Kris Marshall says goodbye to Death in Paradise – and explains why he had to leave
The winds of change are blowing through Saint Marie. Here, Kris Marshall talks through his journey with the show
Some important news if you’re planning to bump somebody off. Get in quick: Detective Inspector Humphrey Goodman – probably the world’s most successful murder cop – is heading back to the UK. Yes, Humphrey, the endearing detective in Death in Paradise, is packing his linen jacket and heading home. Why? Because, after four series, Kris Marshall has decided it’s simply no longer practical to spend six months of the year 4,000 miles away in Guadeloupe, the paradise island that doubles as Saint Marie. Meet the new star of Death in Paradise Ardal O'Hanlon: "With me, they're going for something a little bit quirky" When will Death in Paradise be back for series 7? Brexit could threaten the future of Death in Paradise warns show’s creator View oEmbed on the source website When your home is in Somerset, your work is in the Caribbean and your eldest child has reached school age, something has to give. The star’s son, Thomas, was a baby when Marshall joined the hit series. But now that the little boy is starting school – and he has a baby sister, Elsie – Marshall has decided he can’t carry on ferrying his whole family out to the Caribbean. The 43-year-old star says, “Every year except last year we took Thomas out with us. The only reason they didn’t come out last year was because my daughter was born and she was only three months old when filming started. Thomas has basically spent half his life in the Caribbean. Every year he went to the same nursery in Guadeloupe. But now it’s time for him to put on scholastic shackles and toe the line.” Which explains why a new investigator is taking over Humphrey’s beat: DI Jack Mooney, played by Father Ted star Ardal O’Hanlon. The decision to leave did not come out of the blue, says Marshall. Producers have known his plans for some time. “It’s something my wife and I discussed three or four years ago. When I was first offered the job, my son was six months old and my wife wasn’t working, so it was a very easy decision. We decided I would do Death in Paradise for a few years until it became impractical. It was always quite a finite thing. I certainly didn’t hide it from anyone I work with.” New broom: new Death in Paradise star Ardal O’Hanlon as DI Jack Mooney Indeed, Marshall gave a big hint when he first joined the show, telling RT in 2014: “If you’ve got children who are school age, it must be incredibly tough being away.” This is not, of course, the first time a new man has taken the helm at Saint Marie’s police station. When the series began in 2011, Ben Miller was in the lead role as DI Richard Poole. Miller passed the baton to Marshall after two series – he, too, was struggling with the strain on a young family. Throughout its life, the show has grown and grown. Series one attracted an average of 5.8 million viewers. Pretty good, but compare that with the current figure: the first episode of this series brought in 9.2 million, when you include the people who watched it on iPlayer. Marshall says there’s no secret to its success. When I last spoke to him, he described it as “a cross between Columbo and Scooby-Doo”. Sure, the sunshine is a boost in the middle of a cold, drab British winter. But the main thing is that the drama isn’t pretending to be anything it’s not. “We don’t take ourselves too seriously. People like to smile and they like a caper. And that’s what we are: a crime caper.” Family matters aside, Marshall’s friends must think he’s crazy to give up a job that involves spending six months of the year on some of the world’s prettiest beaches? “Yes, some people think I’m mad, obviously. And there is an old adage, ‘Don’t quit a hit’, which is very true. I’m going to miss it terribly. There have already been times when I’ve thought to myself, ‘Have I made the right decision?’” How have the scriptwriters dealt with Humphrey’s departure? Marshall doesn’t want to spoil anything, but viewers already know that a murder inquiry has taken Humphrey to London – where he finds himself working alongside O’Hanlon’s character. We also know how painful it was when Humphrey’s girlfriend Martha returned to the UK. Is it romance that makes Humphrey stay in London? Marshall is coy. “There are myriad reasons. Of which that may be one.” I ask Marshall what advice he has given his successor. His answer revolves around the heat. When they’re filming outside, it can be up to 40° Celsius. And the indoor scenes are often even more unbearably hot – especially as Humphrey always wears a jacket for work (unlike the real police of Guadeloupe, who are all in short sleeves). “I gave Ardal the same advice that Ben [Miller] gave to me, actually. When you’re filming the big wrapping-up scene at the end, make sure you know your lines backwards. Because we film it all in one day and otherwise the heat starts to get to you. “Secondly, always do your shots first in the morning, before the heat gets too much. Then, after lunch, they turn the cameras on to the guest actors and you can watch them fry!” Will O’Hanlon’s detective, DI Jack Mooney, be very different from Humphrey? “Well, he’s Irish, for starters. So that makes a bit of a difference. His character’s a lot more anecdotal, so the way he goes about things is different. He’s also been recently widowed – and he has a daughter in her early 20s. So that’s a whole different dynamic.” Marshall adds, “I wasn’t there when he got his proper cop feet under the table, but I am hearing worrying talk from Guadeloupe that he was not wearing a jacket. Which upsets me greatly – we can all do it without a jacket. That way, it’s just easy. Then it really is just a holiday.” This interview was originally published in the 11-17 February 2017 issue of Radio Times magazine
Everything you need to know about Sky's new historical drama Jamestown
The true tale of how middle-class brides-for-sale were shipped to America, as shown in the new drama starring Sophie Rundle
It’s a mighty strange perk to offer your employees. “We know it’s been tough these past few years,” a group of demoralised British workers is told, “so we’ve loaded 90 women onto a boat, we’ve sailed them from the other side of the world – and now you’ll get to choose one to be your wife.” A wife, courtesy of your employer? Our age of company cars and private health insurance suddenly feels rather more civilised. Yet this remarkable shipment of women – known as “maids to make wives” – really set sail. Meet the cast of Jamestown Sky orders second series of Jamestown – before the first has even begun RadioTimes.com newsletter: get the latest TV and entertainment news direct to your inbox They left Southampton in 1619, headed for Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent British settlement in North America. The first batch of settlers, all of them male, had arrived 12 years earlier, principally to grow tobacco. They’d endured food shortages, hostility from native Americans and a life almost entirely devoid of women. View oEmbed on the source website Here was an alpha-male workforce getting increasingly despondent and sexually frustrated – hence the idea of bringing in a shipful of ready-made spouses from home. The arrival of women into this brutal environment forms the backdrop to Jamestown, a new eight-part drama on Sky1 starring Max Beesley and the up-and-coming Sophie Rundle. Written by Bill Gallagher, who adapted Lark Rise to Candleford for the BBC, the drama tells a fictitious story set in a “real” 17th-century environment. Gallagher says: “There are two histories of America. There’s the one about the Pilgrim Fathers and God and all of that – the history that’s celebrated on Thanksgiving Day. And then there’s this other, earlier history, which is about colonisation, greed, gold and the effort to transport England to America.” Gallagher and his team went to great efforts to present a faithful picture of the settlers, the women who went out to marry them and the native Americans whose world was turned upside down by these buccaneering outsiders. Another twist in the story is that the settlers were not sent to America by the king. In an early example of what we’d now call privatisation, James I chose not to take the risk himself, but to “outsource” the project to a private business, the Virginia Company of London. Thus, the men who set about creating a new world were not state-sponsored soldiers or civil servants, but employees of a profit-making enterprise. And it was the company chiefs who came up with the “maids to make wives” plan. This was a reward structure that not only guaranteed the loyalty of their workforce, but also made a profit for the business – they didn’t give away the women for free, but sold them to the men. The British-made Jamestown was filmed near Budapest. The countryside around the Hungarian capital makes a convincing-looking Virginia, but there’s an interesting modern twist behind the scenes. In 21st-century Europe you can’t plant fields of tobacco on a whim. The production company had to get a special licence to grow the crop. “And then, when we’d finished, we had to destroy it all,” smiles Gallagher. It all went up in smoke, like a gigantic drugs haul. But what of the story? Dr James Horn, president of the Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation, was an adviser on the series. Talking from his office in Virginia, the historian explains that the women who sailed to America were not, as one might imagine, the waifs and strays of British society. He says they freely volunteered to get on the boats, attracted by a combination of optimism, idealism – and also a hint of greed. “The Virginia Company recruited a group of respectable young women from the middle class and lower middle class,” Horn says. “They weren’t scoured from the streets of London or from the prisons. They weren’t forced into it. “There was a great deal of idealism about setting up a new English society in the New World. It was an expansive and hopeful period. The women saw a future in America. Rumours were circulating that you could get rich quick from tobacco. And this was something that society at home could not offer them.” View oEmbed on the source website Their passage was financed by investors who had been approached with this in mind; once a man had chosen his wife-to-be, he paid the Virginia Company a fee – the equivalent, according to records seen by Horn, of 150lb of tobacco. This was equivalent to a year’s wages for a labourer, or around £15,000 to £20,000 today. But despite the fact that the men had “bought” the women, “this was not slavery”, says Horn, emphatically. “And the reason to make that distinction is that in the same year, 1619, a group of about 30 people, half of them women, arrived from Angola – and they were enslaved.” That said, he admits, “The idealised lives the English women were promised ultimately didn’t quite happen.” In the drama, one “maid” is violently raped by her husband-to-be. Was Virginia a dangerous place for a young woman? Horn says that while it must have been “a very sexually charged situation” – males still outnumbered females by around six to one, even after the women arrived – he doubts that women were under any great threat. “Rape carried the death penalty. There’s no evidence of either English or native American women being raped.” The official evidence may be absent – but surely you’d have to be supremely brave to report a sex attack to the authorities in a 17th-century settler colony. With such a shortage of women, did any of the male settlers have sex with other men? Yes, says Horn, the records are clear on this: a number of men were hanged for having homosexual sex. What about the native Americans? How did they react when the settlers first landed their boats in 1607? In order to get the story accurate, Gallagher turned to Buck Woodard, an anthropologist and local expert. Woodard says that when white men first came to Jamestown, “there was some hostility, but also some intrigue and trade”. Surprisingly, perhaps, people learnt each other’s languages. The native Americans taught the British how to grow maize and beans, and there were even mixed-race relationships – the most famous being the marriage of Pocahontas, the daughter of a native American chief, to settler John Rolfe in 1614. There were also, of course, sporadic flare-ups and bloody battles between the two communities. Woodard says: “Jamestown was not the first European engagement in this area – there was already a Spanish colony in Virginia. The questions native peoples asked were: What was the intention of the English? Were they a threat?” He adds: “The English suggested that they were in America merely looking for a route through to Asia.” Four hundred years on, they’re still there. “But”, he adds, with a hint of satisfaction, “so are the native Americans.” Next page: find out more about the show's star, Sophie Rundle Sophie Rundle in Jamestown This is a big moment for Sophie Rundle. Although she’s been a constant presence in Peaky Blinders, playing Ada Shelby since the first episode in 2013 (and currently filming series four), her character has always been rather overshadowed by the looming presence of her gangster brothers. But in Jamestown, Rundle’s story is right up front. She plays Alice, one of the “maids to make wives” who sailed around 3,700 miles across the Atlantic in order to marry a stranger. Are there any similarities between Peaky Blinders’s Ada and 17th-century Alice? “They look the same!” jokes Rundle. “They come from totally opposite sides of life, but both women have guts. There’s a fight in them. They’re both strong and determined, and not pushovers. “In the first episode,” explains the 29-year-old, originally from Bournemouth in Dorset, “Alice is raped by her Henry, her husband-to-be. I’ve filmed a few scenes like this, but it never gets any easier. As much as you rationally understand it’s not real, your body goes through something. But Max [Beesley, who plays Henry] is a really lovely man and he was such a gent about it. You have to be conscious of what you’re doing so that you tell the story properly. “That’s the funny thing about this job. Some days you turn up, do a bit of speaking and go home. But there are other days when you really earn your money.” There were further challenges in filming Jamestown. “We shot it in Hungary, an hour’s drive outside Budapest, over about five months. When we first arrived it was quite cold, but over the course of filming it became swelteringly hot — up in the 30s. At one point the temperature got so ridiculously high that we had to change the shooting hours because we just couldn’t work in the heat. All the girls had to wear long skirts and corsets… I sweated in places I didn’t know I could sweat!” This article was originally published in May 2017
Julie Bushby has a very different theory for why Karen Matthews lied about daughter Shannon's disappearance
Played by Sheridan Smith, the chair of Moorside's tenants' association says "everybody thinks Karen did it for the reward money. That's the biggest load of crap going"
Once in a while, a news story grabs the nation’s attention – and sends the tabloid press into overdrive. You’ll probably remember the case of Shannon Matthews, a nine-year-old girl who went missing on her way home from school in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, in February 2008. At first, events appeared to be moving in a predictable – if grim – direction. Detectives knocked on doors. Sniffer dogs went through bins. A diving team searched the sewers. And Shannon’s mother appeared on television clutching a teddy bear and begging for the safe return of her daughter. At home, we all hoped for the best – and feared the worst. Then suddenly, three weeks after the little girl went missing, Shannon was found alive. She had been hidden under a bed at the home of a family member. Most shocking of all, the girl’s mother, Karen Matthews, had been an accomplice in her own daughter’s kidnapping. She’d been working in league with her boyfriend’s uncle in an apparent effort to share some of the reward money offered for Shannon’s safe return. The story is told in a new two-part BBC1 drama, The Moorside, named after the council estate where Shannon and her mother lived. The story is largely seen through the eyes of Julie Bushby (played by Sheridan Smith), a woman who lived on the estate. View oEmbed on the source website When she heard Shannon had gone missing, she sprang into action, organising daily search teams, printing and distributing posters, even commissioning T-shirts with the missing girl’s picture and the question: “Have you seen Shannon Matthews?” Today Julie is sitting opposite me. We’re in an overly formal meeting room at a London hotel. Julie has travelled down from Dewsbury to talk to RT. The atmosphere is spiky; Julie is suspicious of journalists. When everything blew up nine years ago, newspaper reporters attacked in print not only Matthews – it didn’t help that she’d had seven children with five different fathers – but also the estate she lived on, something that Julie still resents. Back in 2008, Julie was chair of the estate’s tenants’ association. Sheridan Smith as Julie Bushby Once Matthews had been unmasked as a liar, Julie reminds me, The Sun described Moorside as “like Beirut, only worse”. Even the politicians waded in: Conservative Party leader David Cameron – 18 months away from becoming Prime Minister – wrote that Shannon Matthews came from “a community whose pillars are crime, unemployment and addiction”, where the “role models are criminals, liars and layabouts”. No wonder Julie is wary. How, I ask, does it feel to see an award-winning actor play her on screen? “Doesn’t bother me,” she sniffs. But, within a few minutes, she warms up. And she casts a new light on a story we all thought we knew. Matthews received an eight-year prison sentence for kidnap, false imprisonment and perverting the course of justice. While she was behind bars, she received visits from just one person. The very person who – aside from Shannon – deserves to feel the most aggrieved about her terrible deception: Julie Bushby. Natalie Brown (Sîan Brooke), Julie Bushby (Sheridan Smith) and Karen Matthews (Gemma Whelan) “I visited her every month for four years,” says Julie. Why? “Because I wanted answers. And, at the end of the day, she was a mate.” Is she angry? Julie shakes her head. “What’s the point? Anger just eats away at you.” Julie talks me through the day Shannon went missing. “I was doing my ironing. Someone called up and asked if I would open up the community centre. I asked, ‘What for?’ She said, ‘Shannon’s gone missing off the estate.’ I thought she’d be back by tea-time. But I opened it anyway. The word got round the estate pretty quick and people started searching for her.” Was there any sense of anxiety at that point? No, she says: “You were just on autopilot and you did what you could. I wouldn’t say there was any emotion at the beginning. Not that first night. We thought that maybe she’d stopped over at somebody’s house.” Even when the search stretched into days and weeks, Julie didn’t lose hope. “She had to be alive. When somebody’s dead, the police always find something. A shoe, a coat. But they couldn’t even find the swimming costume [Shannon had had a swimming lesson on the day she went missing]. So if you can’t find any clothing, there ain’t a body.” What did she think had happened? “Well, I just didn’t know.” Julie says she didn’t have any sense that Matthews was involved with Shannon’s disappearance. But she did begin to feel that Matthews was holding something back. Moorside writer Neil McKay (of Mo and Appropriate Adult) says that the struggle to keep hold of her secret led Matthews to behave increasingly oddly. In one scene in the drama, Matthews is being interviewed at home by police when one of the officers’ mobile phones rings. The ringtone is Van Morrison’s Brown Eyed Girl. Matthews gets up from her seat, looks around for an audience and begins to dance. Hardly the demeanour of a woman who fears her daughter might be dead. McKay says he was told the tale by one of the police officers in the room. There were other suspicious moments. On another occasion, says Julie, the man behind the counter at her local fish-and-chip shop gave her family a free dinner: “She replied, ‘Ooh. I’ll have to have one of my kids go missing more often.’” Julie says that the key to understanding Matthews is realising that she is “a child in an adult’s body”. She began to revel in the fame that came with having a missing daughter. She says, “You’ve got to meet Karen to see how childish she is. On the letters she wrote to me from prison, she’d draw little trees and flowers in pretty colours, and write on the envelope ’sealed with a loving kiss’ and ‘best mates forever’.” It’s for this reason – Matthews’s immaturity – that Julie call her “stupid, not evil”. She’s convinced that Matthews’s motive was not money – despite the fact that this has been reported as fact, without question, since the day of the guilty verdict. “Everybody thinks Karen did it for the reward money. That’s the biggest load of crap going.” How can Julie know? Because, after being unmasked as a liar, Matthews was offered money to talk to national newspapers and TV shows, and “not once did she take it”. In any case, Julie says, Karen isn’t bright enough to have cooked up such an elaborate scheme. The real story is more complicated, Julie believes. Matthews was looking to escape the clutches of her then boyfriend, Craig Meehan (who was subsequently convicted of child pornography offences). She’d moved Shannon out of her home secretly as a first step to leaving Meehan. But before she could move out with the rest of her kids, pressure from friends and neighbours forced her to report her daughter missing. And then she was tied into the deception. This version of events is, says McKay, also the one many police officers on the case believe. So where is Karen Matthews now? She was released from prison in 2012, halfway through her sentence, but didn’t return to Moorside. For her own protection, she has been ordered to cut all contacts with her old life. What, I wonder, will Matthews make of the TV drama? “I think she’ll like the attention, to be honest,” says Julie. And Shannon? She is now 18. McKay says that a court order prevents anyone from making direct contact with her, but he has kept social workers informed of the project. I leave my encounter with Julie rather puzzled about the relationship between her and Matthews. What does she get from her friendship with a woman she calls a “blatant liar”? “I don’t get owt from the friendship,” she says. “But she must be so lonely now. I just feel so sorry for her.” View oEmbed on the source website
Martin Shaw on why now is the right time to end Inspector George Gently
The actor talks playing the 1960s Detective Chief Inspector for the final time – and how different this ending is compared to his time in The Professionals
This isn’t the first time Martin Shaw and I have met, though I don’t blame him for not remembering. Today, I’m here to ask him how he feels about saying goodbye to Inspector George Gently, the detective he has played on BBC1 for the past ten years. During our previous encounter, I had one question for him: “Will you tell my sister it’s time to come home?” That was nearly 40 years ago. I was not yet a teenager and he was at the height of his fame in The Professionals (and a rather unhappy man at the time, as we shall see). I’d gone round to his ex-wife’s house – she lived in our road, along with his three children – to collect my sister from a play date with his daughter Sophie. The two girls were good friends, spending afternoons climbing on top of Sophie’s wardrobe, making a “camp” for her stuffed toys. We all knew who Sophie’s dad was (indeed, I was friendly with her elder brother), but the TV star was rarely there. So it was a moment of great excitement when the door of this ordinary semi was answered by CI5 agent Ray Doyle. Shaw smiles when I tell him the story, and tells me that he still goes round to the house for family get-togethers at Christmas and Easter. Although apparently stuffed toys no longer play such a big part in events. In the intervening decades, almost everything has changed in Martin Shaw’s life – he has acquired two further ex-wives and a new long-term partner along the way – yet, once again, he’s grabbing the nation’s attention as a crimefighter. Not for much longer, however. After ten years of playing Detective Chief Inspector George Gently, BBC1 is bringing the show to a close. View oEmbed on the source website There are two episodes in the series starting on Sunday, then no more. So how does it feel to be waving goodbye to the much-loved detective? Perhaps surprisingly, Shaw says he’s not angry with the BBC’s decision to kill the show. “Not in the slightest. In fact, I think it’s absolutely the perfect time to do it.” This isn’t public relations flim flam. This is a man who has never been shy about questioning in public the judgement of TV executives. “It feels completely appropriate,” he says. “I had no difficulty in letting go of the role, because it makes space for something else. All through the last day of filming, people were saying, ‘Are you going to be emotional?’ I said, ‘No, not at all.’ It’s a fact of life. Things come to an end. And then, after the last shot, I started to make a little speech… and I was gone. Bang! So I did get emotional, after all.” There are not many TV dramas that remain popular over the course of a decade. Viewing figures have held steady since the first episode in April 2007, and at the peak of the most recent series, in 2015, were even a little higher. It’s not like there’s a shortage of police officers on TV. So what makes this show stand out? The secret of its success, says Shaw, is that at its heart it’s not really a cop show at all. It’s a show about a decent but damaged man who is making faltering attempts to deal with loss. Right at the start of series one, we discovered that Gently’s wife had been murdered. She’s never been replaced in his life – instead, Gently has invested his emotions in his surrogate “son”, rough-and-ready sidekick Detective Inspector John Bacchus, played by Lee Ingleby. Shaw with Lee Ingleby in Inspector George Gently “The thing that sets this apart from cop shows is that it’s not a whodunnit. The cop side of it is a framework on which to hang the relationship between these two men. Really, it’s the story of a family.” There’s also a nostalgia factor. By setting the show in the 1960s, writer Peter Flannery tapped into a feel-good factor. After all, who doesn’t get a frisson of pleasure when they watch Gently grab a box of Omo washing powder out of his shopping bag? Martin Shaw is 72, though his clean-living lifestyle – no booze, no meat – has blessed him with a complexion that could belong to a man 20 years younger. He lives in a big, old house in Norfolk with his partner Karen Da Silva, a yoga teacher. For several years, they lived in separate houses down the road from each other, but now, he tells me, she’s moved in. There’s just one nod to older age: the hearing aid that’s tucked discreetly into Shaw’s ear, the result of years of piloting his open-cockpit private plane without adequate ear protection. “I got it about a year ago,” he says. “But I don’t wear it on set.” But back to the 1960s. Shaw moved from his home city of Birmingham to London in 1963, to go to drama school with, among others, Maureen Lipman, Lesley Joseph and Stacy Keach. Which means that, in theory at least, he was well placed to play an active part in Swinging London. Did the 60s swing for him? “No, no, no. There wasn’t enough money to live a party lifestyle.” He lived in a one-room bedsit on London’s Westbourne Grove, “with a shared bathroom and toilet, a gas ring and a gas fire”. Was he busy marching against the Vietnam War? No, but he was listening to Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. This surprises me, I tell him. He has a reputation for being, well, quite cross about things? “No I’m not. Not at all.” Did you used to be? “I don’t know. I used to be a heavy drinker. And you could argue that has some roots in anger. But I was never an angry drunk. I was more of a stupid, over-placid, affectionate kind. But that stopped in 1971, a long time ago.” There is one subject, however, that used to irk him every time he was asked about it: the show that made him a star – The Professionals. For years, Shaw despised the ITV action series that he worked on from 1977 to 1981. View oEmbed on the source website He has described Doyle, the tough guy he played, as “a one-dimensional character in a one-dimensional show” and said the drama “disenfranchised my career… it was like being an Action Man doll. No humanity. Just a function.” The subject comes up when we discuss the fact that three characters have dominated his working life: George Gently (whom he has played for ten years), Judge John Deed (six years), and Ray Doyle (six years). Which of the three men does he view with the most fondness? Without pausing, he answers, “John Deed”. But, he quickly adds: “Which is not to disrespect George Gently…” But you do, I suggest, disrespect Ray Doyle? He doesn’t disagree. “Well, with George Gently and John Deed, I was there willingly throughout.” Say that again? Are you telling me that you worked on The Professionals against your will? Indeed so. “I foolishly signed a contract that I thought they would let me out of. It’s completely my own fault.” How many series did you make under duress? “Four and a half. After the first one, I thought I’d graciously be able to say, ‘Thank you very much, but this is not for me.’” Instead, he claims, the producers insisted he make more. Rightly or wrongly, he believes that they deliberately timed the shooting schedule in such a way as to prevent him from taking on other (more high-brow) work. You make it sound like spite, I tell him. “Well, I don’t think it was spite. I think it was proprietorial.” TV chiefs didn’t want their tough-man crime-fighter poncing around on stage at the National Theatre. Shaw says that he didn’t even get rich on the back of the show. “We got paid very little for The Professionals. Very little. We started on £400 a week and finished on about £1,500 a week.” And, he argues, he’s never earned a penny from repeats (indeed, for years an obscure argument about royalties blocked ITV from reshowing old episodes). The traditional charge is that Shaw’s attitude towards The Professionals is ingratitude on an epic scale. 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. Had he not spent those years wearing tight T-shirts and pointing guns at dodgy geezers, would he be where he is today? “It’s a very fair comment. And it’s a charge that I accept. I hold my hand up. Mea culpa.” But – and here’s the big news – after years of bitterness, Martin Shaw has made his peace with The Professionals. “Let me round this off. Because it’s been a long dissertation on the down side. All the antipathy has faded away.” Why? Because a few years back, a younger actor explained to him how important the show was as part of their childhood. “And I suddenly got it. So all that antipathy has faded away.” Phew. And, as George Gently fades away, how would he feel about taking on another long role that might take him into his 80s? “Yeah, yeah,” he says. “Absolutely.” This article was originally published in 20-26 May 2017 issue of Radio Times magazine
Richard Osman: it's time we made bright kids the heroes
The host of Child Genius discusses the importance of losing, his own upbringing and why it's OK for children to compete on TV
Richard Osman – a man of many talents, but not often celebrated for his grooviness – is mulling over what it takes to be accepted as a young person in 21st-century Britain. “It’s cool to be good looking, it’s cool to be good at sport, it’s cool to be funny. But it’s not always fun to be clever. So you have to hide it away,” he says. “But on this show we make clever kids the heroes. We’re saying it’s OK to learn stuff and know answers to things. We’re doing a great service for these kids.” He’s talking about Child Genius, which pits boys and girls aged eight to 12 against each other in an intelligence contest, and which returns for a new series this week with Osman at the helm. Like many shows of its type, it makes much of the fact that the questions are savagely difficult – and it’s pretty justified in doing so. (You might be a grown-up, but can you spell “immarcescible”? And do you know what it means?). But the toughest question is one that remains unspoken during the week-long elimination contest. Is it fair to expose these 20 young people to the stress of a televised competition like this? Are they fully aware of the risk of humiliation if they perform badly under the spotlight? Osman’s answer to this ethical concern leans heavily on a career spent mostly behind the screen at production company Endemol Shine, creating and pitching TV programmes to broadcasters. (His on-screen work, here and on Pointless, is a small part of his professional life.) “Obviously I work in an environment where people put themselves forward for shows all the time and make fools of themselves. It’s different if they’re kids – and I get that. But I think, and I certainly hope, that the way that we present the show, the way they’re looked after on the day, the way that we run it…” I interrupt. I’m sure I’ve heard Jerry Springer talk in a similar manner about the “after care” provided to guests on his bear pit of a show. “Absolutely. But do you know what? I don’t make The Jerry Springer Show and I do make this. I want everybody leaving this show feeling it’s a positive experience. Listen, I don’t mind people going through a bit of trauma. I don’t mind people going through difficulty. I don’t mind people crying. Because that happens in life…” And it’s good telly? “Forget about good telly. It happens in life and it’s important. So long as you’re providing support. The first thing I say to the children is: ‘Look, 19 of you are not going to win this. Only one of you is.’ But you know what? By and large, you don’t win stuff in life. What gets you through is being proud of yourself and doing your best. You don’t build resilience by stepping away from being competitive or by not putting yourself in a stressful situation.” To be fair to Osman and the show, Child Genius is put together in a kinder manner than, say, one of Simon Cowell’s shows – and it’s certainly nothing like Springer’s. The aim is not to embarrass or shame – but as Osman’s comment about crying illustrates, the show does want to present a dramatic story to viewers. Osman says candidly: “I don’t think a show like that would be commissioned on British TV and I don’t think British viewers would watch it.” View oEmbed on the source website There is, however, another question. Child Genius isn’t just about the kids. It’s about the parents. Some of the mums and dads cheerfully encourage their offspring. Others are off-the-scale pushy. Is it the job of a parent to produce the happiest child or the cleverest? Is there a conflict between those two ambitions? “Yes of course there is,” says father-of-two Osman, “we all have different views about what’s going to make our children happy.” Osman’s own upbringing is not what you might expect. He grew up with his brother in a single-parent household – his dad walked out when he was very young – went to the local comprehensive and won a place at Cambridge, the first boy from Warden Park school, in Cuckfield, West Sussex, to have got there. His mum, Brenda, a teacher, couldn’t afford foreign holidays or a car but she “understood all the things that are important about how to bring up kids. Just allowing them to be themselves and responding to what they enjoy,” Osman recalls. “I was very lucky to be born to the mother I was.” What’s more, he says with real pride, “she educated a generation of Sussex children, all of whom hold her in great esteem.” One of the child geniuses: Ronan Did Brenda hothouse Osman, in the way some of the parents on Child Genius do? “God no, the opposite. Because she’s a teacher she knows you’ve got to let kids do what they want to do. Which is what I’ve always believed.” Left to his own devices, Osman decided to watch lots of TV. And now, he reasons, that knowledge was super-useful… given that he works in TV. That’s fine, for the tiny percentage of people who’ll end up in broadcasting. But surely it’s not good advice in general? “You don’t think?” he responds. (He’s not joking.) The important thing, he believes, is to encourage whatever it is that your child is interested in. “If your kid is really good at fixing his bike, then it’s probable that at some point in his life he’ll want to do that sort of thing for a living.” So I shouldn’t worry that my own 11-year-old spends so many hours on his Xbox? “You know what? Well, as long as he knows who’s making the games, who did the music for them, how you storyboard a game, stuff like that… That whole generation is going to work in video games and video content. And if you played those games for a very long time in your childhood, you’re going to be better than people who didn’t.” So that’s Richard Osman’s recipe for success: lots of telly and lots of computer games. Genius! Child Genius is on Monday-Friday 8.00pm C4
24 Hours in Police Custody: behind the scenes of the fly-on-the-wall documentary
Life in Luton police station is more gripping than any drama. But why do the suspects agree to appear on camera?
Simon Ford, mastermind behind 24 Hours in Police Custody, says: “At the beginning, I thought: ‘Why would any criminal ever want to be on this programme? And why would any police officer want to open themselves up to this?’ ” Very sensible questions, because this is a fly-on-the-wall documentary utterly swarming with flies – and they’re peering down at a group of human beings going through the most desperate moments of their lives. We see into the eyes of men (it’s usually men) suspected of murder, rape, armed robbery. We watch other people emotionally describe falling victim to some of the worst crimes you can imagine; and, most remarkable of all, we stand alongside the police officers as they do their best to piece together what precisely happened. So how does the programme, based at Luton police station, get made? The day I visit, the production team is 73 days into an 82-day shoot. On the ground floor of a two-storey portable building erected in a sealed-off part of the station car park, Ford and his team are perched in front of a bank of 40-odd TV screens. In one sense, our little patch of TV land is entirely quarantined from the police station. In another, it’s intimately connected. It’s strange to think that the people on screen are just 50 yards away. Behind me, dozens of photographs have been taped to the wall, pictures of Luton’s most notorious (alleged) criminals pasted up so that the production team can recognise a villain the moment he’s brought in to the nick. Today, things are quiet. There are no scuffles in the custody suite. No blood – “claret” in the trade – down the front of a shirt. It’s a humdrum day unlikely to make it into the series, though, as in almost every episode, there’s a young man in an interview room grumpily repeating “no comment” to every question he’s asked. That’s the thing with flies on the wall. Some days, there’s not much to see. Other days, the drama is better than any TV cop show – precisely because you know that everything is real. Ford describes the goings-on at Luton police station as “big city problems in a small town”. But what really strikes me is that none of the police officers or their suspects seems remotely interested in the fact that a TV crew is watching and recording their every step. The live TV pictures are courtesy of 76 remote-controlled cameras – “the same type that were used in the first series of Big Brother,” says Ford – that C4 has temporarily installed all over the station. There are dozens of microphones too, some worn on the officers’ clothing. The cameras – big, white things, as long as your forearm - are mounted on the ceiling and operated remotely from the car park bunker. If a director sees something interesting, he or she can point and zoom at whatever they like. There are signs dotted around the station informing visitors that their moment of fame might be around the corner. “Please be aware that filming for a Channel 4 documentary series is taking place throughout the police station today… a member of the TV production team may approach you to give you more information about the series.” But, with one major exception (as we shall see), no one can force you to be on TV. So, to return to Ford’s question, why do people agree to take part? Never mind the police, what about the suspects? “I was utterly amazed when we first started that anyone would talk to us,” says Ford. “I couldn’t imagine a more stressful place to be: you know that you might be losing your liberty. But the psychology is that people don’t feel listened to. They’re brought to the station and being asked about specifics of that day, but they want to tell a bigger story. They want to give an explanation of themselves: ‘It’s because of my drug addiction’ or ‘because I was abused as a child’ or whatever.” A small number of people decide not to take part in the programme. A few police officers have their face blurred – “Some just say: ‘I don’t fancy it.’ Some are under cover or might be going under cover in the future,” explains Ford – and some victims choose not to be identifiable. What if a member of the public dials 999 to report an incident and subsequently the crime features in the programme? Ford is duty bound to disguise your voice if he wants to include the phone call and you don’t want to be identifiable: “We’ll change the pitch, or turn a male voice into a female one.” But what are the rights of the suspects? From the outset, as Ford has said, most of those being interviewed in the police station have already given their consent. And that consent can’t be withdrawn once agreed. But what if a villain who hasn’t consented wants to keep his guilty face off the TV screens? “We have to balance the suspect’s right to privacy with the public’s right to know,” says Ford. Just as local newspaper reporters sit in court and publish the names of the guilty, “in cases where someone doesn’t want to be on the programme, we might decide it’s in the public interest for that person to be seen.” In other words, if you murdered someone, you’ve forfeited any right to anonymity. What if you’re taken to court and found innocent? Or never charged in the first place? In that case, your privacy will be respected if you didn’t consent to being filmed and insist on remaining anonymous. 24 Hours in Police Custody is on Monday 19th June at 9pm on Channel 4
Robert Winston talks what Child of Our Time got wrong: ‘I was never happy presenting this as nature v nurture’
Lord Winston also talks being bullied at school and the new challenges faces kids of today
At the start of the latest instalment of Child of Our Time, Robert Winston spells out the reason why, in the year 2000, the BBC decided to start filming 25 newborn babies and to keep filming them as they turned into toddlers, children – and now teenagers. “It was a quest,” he declares on the voiceover, “to find out what makes us who we are: nature or nurture?” So I’m a little surprised that Lord Winston tells me, right at the start of our interview, “I was never really happy about presenting this as ‘nature versus nurture’.” Not even at the very start of the project, all those years ago. Why? Because even then, he says, the concept “was already dated”. “This was something we argued about a bit,” – Winston and the BBC, that is – “in a very friendly sort of way. But I ended up presenting it as ‘nature versus nurture’ even though I was increasingly aware the science would be changing.” And that’s how he’s presenting it this time, too. A simple battle between the two concepts. On the TV, if not when you speak to him in person. The thing is, he explains to me, “we now know that nurture can actually affect nature”. Think about that: what the professor is saying is that our behaviour today can change our genes – and thus affect the lives of future generations. “We now know that environmental influences one, two, three or even four generations back can make a difference to a child’s development,” he says. He points to an animal experiment where pregnant mice were deliberately overfed, but their offspring and subsequent generations were given a normal diet. “By the fourth generation you can see some of the females developing diabetes. So it’s a very complex issue and it’s clear that the environment plays all sorts of tricks on our nature. And our genes respond to that.” Robert Winston with the Child of Our Time children in 2005 Of course, what transforms Child of Our Time from a science lecture into a piece of mainstream factual TV is the real-life stories at its heart. The two programmes in this update are based on footage filmed last year, when all the babies reached the age of 16. Those tiny babies are now fully fledged teenagers. Alice, Phoebe and Mabel, the three non-identical triplets RT met and photographed when they were first born, are now in the sixth form, although they still live in Redditch in Worcestershire. (Left to right) Phoebe, Alice, Mabel There are some remarkable transformations since we last visited the rest of the children in 2013. For example, we see Matt – whom we’ve only ever known as a shy, anxious boy – flower into a thrill-seeker, never happier than when attached to a parachute and plummeting through the air. The programme also brings us up to date with Eve. She’s the girl whose mother died in 2008 and who grew up at a Christian retreat. Eve, we learn, came out as gay two years ago. She tells a lovely story about how she wrote a detailed note for her dad revealing her sexuality – only for him to spend days blindly walking past the piece of paper. So she was forced to tell him face to face. Happily, her father couldn’t have been more supportive. Winston says that this story emphasises that the biggest changes since the start of the project have been social, not scientific. He says: “That conversation [between Eve and her father] would have been much more difficult when this programme started. The science may be important but we shouldn’t overemphasise it. In many respects, societal changes are predominant.” Another big change is the impact on young people of social media, a phrase that didn’t even exist when the 25 children were born. Today 16-year-olds such as Alice, Mabel and Phoebe are almost certain to have smartphones and be active on Snapchat, WhatsApp and many other apps that mean little or nothing to their parents and grandparents. View oEmbed on the source website There are plenty of good things about this, of course, but it also means that if a youngster is being bullied, the abuse follows them home from school – and is there in the evening and at weekends. Does that make things worse for the young people of today? “Cyber-bullying might be a bit more sophisticated but bullying has always been a problem,” counters Winston. “Let’s not forget that physical bullying was common in the past and was, I think, much understated. I’m not sure cyberbullying is any worse than the physical bullying I experienced when I was at school.” You were bullied, Lord Winston? “I think most boys have been bullied at one time or another. Yes. I was bullied by teachers, too.” What happened? “Well, I’m not convinced that that’s any part of the film, is it? It might be for my memoirs or another programme…” Message received. He won’t go there. Whatever happened to the young Robert Winston growing up in suburban north London will have to wait. Time for a closing thought. Is now a good time to be a young person? On this subject, the 76-year-old scientist, fertility expert and Labour peer is reassuringly positive. Society is getting better, he believes. “Would you rather live in 2016 than in 1916? Would you rather live in 1916 than 1816? Would you rather live in 1816 than 1716? The answer is yes in every case. Because even allowing for wars, there’s been a steady improvement in our lives.” Obviously there are huge exceptions, but “we are, on the whole, more peaceful and more collaborative, more socially aware. There’s better education. We are richer. And our young people have more confidence than ever before.” Child of Our Time is on Monday, Tuesday 9.00pm BBC1 (10.40pm Tuesday in Wales)
"It was my duty to get the names out": the brutal stories of Assad's victims told in C4's Syria’s Disappeared
Mansour al-Omari smuggled the names of his fellow prisoners out of a Syrian jail written in blood – now Channel 4 are documenting this grisly testimony of Syrian President Assad’s regime
This scrap of frayed material carries a secret. It’s a secret that, on one level, seems almost trivial – the smudged writing is merely a list of names. Yet the very existence of this unofficial roll call, written on the cloth using ink made out of blood mixed with rust, could have led to a severe beating – possibly death – for the man who is holding it, and who still treasures it. Mansour al-Omari is a Syrian human rights activist. On 16 February 2012, four men in civilian clothes came into his office carrying AK- 47s and arrested everybody they could find. For the next 356 days, Mansour was a secret prisoner of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. He was held in an overcrowded cell with more than 50 other men, beaten every day and forced to endure appalling living conditions with very little food. Meanwhile, Mansour’s elderly parents had no idea where their son was, or whether he was alive or dead. Many of his fellow inmates did not survive the ordeal. And it is this uncertainty that led Mansour to write the men’s names on the cloth. Mansour al-Omari “My working life before I was arrested was finding out the identities of people who had been arrested and detained by Assad. So when I was detained, I knew I needed to document what was going on.” That way, the men’s suffering would not go unnoticed; and the men’s relatives would, it was hoped, find out that their husband, father, brother, was alive. “We’d gather in groups and tell each other our names and phone numbers, so that if one of us was released we’d be able to call the families. I felt it was my duty, if I survived, to get the names out. But because of the conditions, and the lack of food, we started to forget lots of things.” So a more sophisticated plan was hatched. One of the prisoners was a tailor. If they could write the names on pieces of old clothing, he would be able to stitch the material inside the collar and cuffs of a shirt, which could be smuggled out on the back of anyone fortunate enough to be released. After a bit of experimentation with different inks, the blood-and-rust combination was used to inscribe the names. They used a fragment of chicken bone as a rudimentary quill. Mansour’s story and others are told in Channel 4’s Syria’s Disappeared. The documentary is, as you’d expect, grim and distressing – though there is a hint of hope towards the end when it describes an audacious legal bid to bring at least some of the Assad’s henchmen to justice. Three years after his release, Mansour speaks to RT from his new adoptive home in Sweden, where he continues his human rights work. He talks candidly but unemotionally, and I’ve been warned not to pry too deeply into the detail of the treatment meted out to him. But he talks of a prison regime that sounds unbearable. Around 60 prisoners were kept together in a cell of approximately 500 square feet. Think about that: less than ten square feet per person. The lack of space meant the men had to draw up a “shift system” to sleep. There simply wasn’t enough room for everybody to lie down on the floor at the same time. (And even with the shift system, prisoners only had room to sleep on their sides, rather than on their backs.) Mansour says that the guards were armed with truncheons, tasers, iron bars. They beat the prisoners every day, usually twice – whenever they brought food. As a result, detainees were left with open, infected wounds. During interrogation, there was extreme torture: men were hung from their wrists or electrocuted. Ribs were broken. Unspeakable things were done to their genitals. The documentary provides photographic evidence of some of this torture. Too often, the only evidence of the brutality of war that we see on our screens is bombed streets and destroyed buildings. But Assad’s regime, like other dictatorships before it, seems to take a bureaucratic pride in documenting everything it does. This includes photographing the torture it carries out. One man was brave enough to smuggle out a huge cache of these photos. In 2013 a defector, code-named “Caesar”, brought more than 53,000 images out of the country. It’s shocking that this leak from the heart of a brutal regime did not cause more of a stir at the time. But some of these photos are shown in the programme. Be warned: these are some of the most graphic images ever seen on TV. It is one thing to read that interrogators gouge out the eyes of prisoners before killing them. It is quite another to see a picture. Producer Nicola Cutcher says the photographs are “certainly on the edge of what is tolerable for a television audience”. It was, she says, a very difficult decision to include them. “We thought the photographs were important. When their existence was first reported, somehow they failed to make an impact on the public consciousness. Most people don’t know about them. Why is that? We hope this will finally make people realise the truth about Assad’s regime.” That said, “A lot of photos are too horrible to show.” And what of Mansour? His release was almost as sudden as his capture. Almost a year after his arrest (on charges of “spreading fake news” and unauthorised contacts with foreigners), he was brought into a courtroom and placed in front of a judge. “The judge said, ‘Do you confess?’ I said: ‘No, nothing is true.’ Then he said, ‘OK, you can go. You are innocent.’” I ask Mansour whether he believes that Bashar al-Assad – the man directing all this unspeakable cruelty – will himself die a peaceful death. “I’m sure he will not die peacefully,” says the former detainee, explaining that the Syrian leader is believed to be implicated in the deaths of 230,000 people. “Even if he leaves, or he flees, he will be caught – either by people seeking revenge or by justice.” Syria’s Disappeared: the Case Against Assad is on Thursday 23 March at 10.00pm on C4
“It’s a confederacy of amateurs” – John Bird opens up the House of Lords in BBC documentary
John Bird used to wash dishes in the House of Lords – now he’s back to clean up after our MPs
The precise moment of transformation came at 2.44pm on 7 December 2015. That was when John Bird swore an oath of allegiance to the Queen and took his seat in the House of Lords as Baron Bird, of Notting Hill in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Lord Bird took the long way round to get here. This newly installed pillar of the establishment arrived on the famous red benches via the orphanage, borstal and prison. He’s slept on the streets, and admits he started out as “a loser, a cheat and a fraud”. And surely he’s the first member of the Upper House who’s previously worked in the building washing up dishes in the House of Lords kitchens. That was in 1970. And he didn’t last long. “I worked in the kitchens for two weeks,” he recalls. “Back then, I was a member of the Workers Revolutionary Party. I spent all my time trying to stir up my fellow workers to destroy capitalism. The head cook said to me: ‘Why don’t you f*** off back off to Russia?’ She told the employment agency that had sent me to work for her: ‘Don’t send him back.’” CONFIRMED:@BBCTwo goes behind-the-scenes @UKHouseofLords ? Major new 3-part series Meet the Lords starts 27 Feb 9pm https://t.co/so4FlFTSSK pic.twitter.com/zScoWy9qga — BBC News Press Team (@BBCNewsPR) February 15, 2017 Lord Bird, now 71, is a social entrepreneur and homelessness campaigner. Most notably, he’s the man who founded The Big Issue magazine, sold by homeless people. He features prominently in the first episode of Meet the Lords, a new BBC2 documentary series that goes behind the scenes to tell a much broader story than the clichéd posh-people-in-ermine tale we’ve seen so many times. We meet in Westminster – and Bird says immediately that, 47 years after his kitchen stint, it’s good to be back. “The first time I worked in the House of Lords I did it because I wanted money. But I also had my principles: I was here to change the world. And now I’ve come back and I’m still here to change the world. I’m here to dismantle poverty.” Bird is convinced that by speaking in the chamber, and helping with the line-by-line analysis and amendment of legislation that goes on (usually unnoticed) in the Lords, he can improve the lot of homeless people much more than by shouting from the sidelines. Did he have any preconceptions about the Lords before his ennoblement? Only one. “I thought the place would be less welcoming, that people would be more standoffish. I speak louder in the chamber than anybody and I thought they would have problems with that. But I mentioned it to somebody and they replied: ‘Look, there are a lot of people in the Lords who can’t even hear.’” I ask if he feels nervous looking around the chamber knowing there is no one else remotely like him anywhere else in the room. “No, not at all. Because I think the House of Lords wants to reform itself. I think there’s a passion here – the people really do want to get on with the job of holding the government to account.” So is he now a convert? Does he believe the Lords is an essential part of our parliamentary democracy? Only, he says, because the House of Commons regularly churns out “shambolic” legislation. “The only reason we need a House of Lords is because we have an ill-functioning democracy – you need experts, people that are outside of the system. I came into the House of Lords at the same time as Baroness Watkins of Tavistock – who started life as a trainee nurse and ended up running a medical school – and Lord Mair, a professor of engineering at Cambridge University. You don’t get those kind of people in the Commons. “Increasingly, the Commons has been filled with professional politicians. If you leave the government of Britain exclusively to people who are learning on the job then you’re in a perilous situation. We need a safeguard to counter this confederacy of amateurs.” Has it ever occurred to him that some of his fellow peers might be looking down their noses at the former rough sleeper in their midst? “I’ve never thought anybody was better than me. I’ve never met anybody in this world who’s superior to me. Never. I have what is commonly called delusions of grandeur.” Final question. It’s been more than a year since Bird took his seat. Plenty of time to do the little things that you or I might do if we’d changed our name from mere “Mr” or “Mrs” to “Lord” or “Lady”. So what name is printed on his chequebook and credit cards? “I don’t have a bank account for Lord Bird,” says the man who spent several spells in prison as a young man for theft and fraud. “And I don’t have a credit card for Lord Bird. I have a credit card for a very common man called John Bird. Actually, it’s not even my credit card account – it’s my wife’s. Because I’ve never been allowed one.” Meet the Lords Monday, 9.00pm, BBC2
Who shall we save today? BBC2's Hospital reveals an NHS in crisis
Meet the healthcare decision-makers that face daily life and death dilmemmas
There’s a moment in the first episode of Hospital, BBC2’s new fly-on-the-wall documentary series, that’s very difficult to watch. We’re in a bare white room in St Mary’s hospital in Paddington, west London, with 67-year-old Simon, a gaunt but cheerful man who has cancer. He’s been prepped for surgery, ready for a potentially life-saving operation to remove the tumour on his oesophagus. He’s been here before. But the last time he got himself emotionally ready for his operation, the hospital cancelled it at the last minute. And now his doctor has just been in to tell him his surgery will likely be cancelled for a second time. The cause of his distress – through no fault of her own – is an elderly woman called Janice. She’s seriously ill and currently racing towards St Mary’s in the back of an ambulance. One of her main blood vessels has ruptured and, if she doesn’t have an emergency operation as soon as she gets to St Mary’s, she will bleed to death. Here’s the crunch: while there are enough surgeons, anaesthetists and nurses to perform operations on both Simon and Janice, there’s only an intensive care bed for one of them. Which means that either she gets her life-saving operation – or he does. View oEmbed on the source website Simon has been told that if Janice survives the journey, his operation will be cancelled for a second time. But if she loses her life en route, he can head straight for the operating theatre. How does that make him feel? He fights back the tears as he contemplates his answer. Just two words tumble out. “Guilty, actually.” Cameras have been inside hospitals many times. The story they usually tell is of heroic doctors and their successes and failures in the operating theatre. That’s an important story, and a tried-and-tested TV formula. But this series is trying to do something different. The production team filmed for six weeks in October and November in the five London hospitals that comprise the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. The focus of their interest is not the ins-and-outs of what goes on in the operating theatres – but the behind-the scenes decisions that enable the operations to happen (or not). Giulio Anichini (above) works at St Marys Hospital In any system of healthcare, some people get treatment and some do not. Here we see the people who make those decisions, and we get to see how they solve some horrible dilemmas. The picture that emerges is of an NHS stretched to its limits – and sometimes beyond. As Dr Simon Ashworth, head of intensive care at St Mary’s, says: “The elastic is a bit nearer to breaking now than it perhaps ever was.” Watching people make these life-and-death decisions is not a comforting experience. Demand for its services are running so high at St Mary’s that the hospital is several times plunged into “code black”, the highest level of alert. Though the implications of a “code black” vary from situation to situation, it means that patients are sent home earlier than they normally would be, ambulances are diverted to other hospitals and operations are put on hold. One of the senior staff featured in the series is Lesley Powls, site director at St Mary’s (below). It’s her job to act as “air traffic controller” at the hospital – making sure that the beds, doctors and patients are all in the right place at any one time. She likens her role to the children’s building game Jenga. “The tower has never yet come crashing down and my job is to stop that happening. But life here is sometimes a little bit wobbly.” Professor Tim Orchard is divisional director of medicine and integrated care at the Trust (he’s also a practising consultant gastroenterologist). Given the huge stresses his hospital is dealing with – not to mention the Trust’s expected financial shortfall of £41 million this year – why did he and his colleagues agree to let the cameras in? He chooses his words carefully. “I hope people will realise that we are having to work pretty hard to make sure patients get the care they need when they need it.” Shehan Hettiaratchy works at St Marys Hospital Some of the choices are wretched. Might the Trust want us to see the work of Prof Orchard and his colleagues in order to encourage the public to lobby for increased NHS funding? “I don’t think that’s the motivation. It’s about letting people understand how we work – apart from anything else, it’s so people can understand how they fit in.” There’s a very sad postscript to the first episode. Simon, the cancer patient, did finally get his operation – just one day later, at the third attempt. But six weeks after surgery he died, after contracting a blood and immune disorder known as HLH. It’s a reminder that for all the advances in medicine, and all the decent, hardworking people in the NHS, no one can ever guarantee a happy outcome. The man who makes foreigners pay Terry Facey (above) is overseas officer for the Imperial College Trust. It’s his job to check whether patients are eligible for free treatment on the NHS — and to present a bill to those who are not. He says the rules are complicated but, “broadly speaking, the eligibility for free NHS treatment is based on residency. Treatment given in A&E is free, as is the ambulance. But if you’re admitted onto a ward and you’re not resident in the UK, you become liable to charges.” In the year 2015 – 16 those charges amounted to £4 million; the Trust collected just 40 per cent, or £1.6 million. Facey says very few of those who face charges are so-called “health tourists” — foreign nationals who have come here specifically to receive free NHS treatment. It’s estimated that health tourism costs the NHS anywhere between £110 million and £280 million a year. “That’s a very small part of what I see. My typical client is a holidaymaker or a family member from one of the poorer countries who’s here for a few months visiting relatives. These people are often elderly, and in the time they’re here they might fall ill or have an accident.” The bills can be eye-watering. His recent caseload included a 43-year-old Nigerian mother who arrived at the Trust’s maternity hospital, Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea, after going into premature labour with quadruplets during a flight. Three babies survived the birth, and were cared for on the neonatal ward. At the time of filming for the series the bill for their care was already £100,000 and looked likely to rise to half a million pounds during the course of their treatment. Facey also recently took a payment of £54,000 from a patient who’d undergone a neurological operation. She financed her hospital stay by setting up a crowd-funding appeal in her home country. How do patients react to Facey’s bad news? “There have been a few occasions when it’s been a bit… close. I’ve experienced a few rants. People get angry. But if I feel it’s going to be difficult I’ll ask a senior nurse to come with me as a chaperone. It softens things if there’s a medical person by your side.” Hospital airs on Wednesday 11 January at 9pm on BBC2
Eric Idle on Terry Jones, Brian Cox, religion and The Entire Universe
The Monty Python man has written the story of our universe, all 100 trillion years of it from start to finish – told in 60 minutes. Who said the licence fee wasn’t value for money?
Eric Idle has written a Christmas musical for BBC2 – but, as you might imagine, the Monty Pythonman’s contribution is not typical of the genre. Sure, there are dancing girls in waist-coats and white gloves. Yes, there are singalong songs and high kicks. And – it is Christmas after all – even Morecambe and Wise get a look-in. But this is a high-kicking extravaganza like no other. For a start, the main star is (an initially bamboozled) Brian Cox. And he’s supported – rather against his will, as it happens – by Albert Einstein on a bike and some familiar faces attempting to answer life’s biggest mysteries, such as: is it possible to have sex in space? Welcome to The Entire Universe– the story of our universe, all 100 trillion years of it from start to finish – told in 60 minutes. Who said the licence fee wasn’t value for money? “The fact is that in an hour you learn everything about the entire universe,” says Idle. “But in a musical. With singing and dancing and funny people.” Including Idle himself, of course. Noel Fielding, Hannah Waddingham and Warwick Davis in The Entire Universe It’d be pointless to describe The Entire Universe in any more detail, save to say that if you enjoyed Spamalot, the hit stage musical Idle created a decade ago, you’ll probably enjoy this. Indeed, Idle and his Spamalotco-writer, John Du Prez, originally wrote this new show as a theatre production – until the BBC stepped in and offered to make it for TV. The most surprising thing? That there’s quite a lot of science in the show. That’s largely because Idle and Cox are friends in real life. The pair met after Cox went to see Idle in a show about four years ago. “He just popped up and immediately we started talking about the universe. We became friends from there. We’d get several bottles of Ruinart [champagne], go and eat some Chinese food and solve the universe.” Brian Cox Idle says it’s a subject he’s always been fascinated by. “We don’t really know much about it. We don’t know how or why the universe came into existence, but we know when – and that all the energy everywhere, and everything that exists, was packed into this tiny, dense pinprick of time and moment.” Is there, I ask, a God who made this all happen? Idle is emphatic. “No, don’t be stupid. That’s insane. You don’t have to invent anything new to explain what you’re understanding.” He quotes Pierre-Simon Laplace, the 18th-century French physicist, “who was once asked by the king: ‘Where is God in all this?’ and he replied: ‘Sire, I have no need of that concept.’ You don’t need to have an inventor to have things evolve. Evolution doesn’t need an inventor.” In any case, Idle says, Richard Dawkins correctly pointed out that if you needed a grand designer to design the universe, wouldn’t you also – by the same logic – need a designer to design that very designer? And so on, for ever... “The thing I love about science is everything is testable. What we’re saying in the show has been measured, tested and backed up by thousands of scientists – and, thanks to things like the Hubble telescope, our knowledge of the universe has increased so much, since even the 1990s. There’s no need to go into fiction.” The Hubble Space Telescope was launched into low Earth orbit in 1990, and remains in operation So why do so many people think God answers their questions about the universe? “Because they need a father. They’re insecure and they want somebody to look after them.” He says that religion “is more human than it is divine. I think man created God in his own image.” That said, Idle – who shies away from the term “atheist” (“I don’t like that word, it implies that there’s a God not to believe in”) – isn’t on a mission to persuade people out of their faith. “I think people can absolutely believe what the hell they want. It’s like believing in Tottenham Hotspur if you want to. Go ahead.” God or no God, Idle knows as much as anybody that we’re not all dealt the same set of cards in life. As he lives out a sunny life in Los Angeles, his old friend and Monty Python colleague Terry Jones faces a gloomy future back home in the UK. Jones let it be known earlier this year that he is suffering from a rare form of dementia, one that begins by attacking the patient’s ability to use language and gets progressively worse. Terry Gilliam, Michael Palin, John Cleese, Eric Idle, John Oliver, and Terry Jones pose for a photo backstage at the Monty Python And The Holy Grail special screening in 2015 “It’s very sad. It’s been coming on for about five or six years and we’ve all known about it. And it gets worse. I was only happy that we managed to do the Monty Pythonshows at the O2 [in 2014] while we could still get him through it.” Even then, Jones knew he was unwell, and struggled to remember his lines. Idle reveals that, behind the scenes, the other Pythons let Jones know they were there to support him. “We said, ‘Look, Terry, don’t worry, we’re going to get you through this. We’re all in this together. You’re not to blame.’ It’s like people who have bipolar disorder or something, it’s not their fault. These are genes and things that have got into our systems and we are now at the mercy of them.” Has he seen Jones recently? Michael Palin, who lives in London, sees Jones most often – “They go over to the pub,” says Idle – but he saw him a few months ago at one of the Python team’s regular business meetings. “You know, you can sit and have a drink with him, a bottle of wine. And we went to New York I think last year and he was on stage there, but he was having trouble stringing sentences together and it was becoming noticeable – so I’m glad they came out with it and acknowledged his illness in public.” How are his friend’s spirits? “It doesn’t seem to me that he’s unhappy. I think it’s harder for people around them than for the person themselves. “But he hasn’t forgotten who he is, yet. It hasn’t got to that point. Terry’s still here. He’s not gone.” The Entire Universe is on BBC2 at 9.30pm
Could this be the next essential piece of kit for Parkinson’s sufferers?
A game-changing gadget is designed for Emma Lawton on The Big Life Fix with Simon Reeve
“It’s a tiny, tiny human right,” says Emma Lawton, a 33-year-old graphic designer. “To be able to make that mark on a piece of paper. It’s your identity. And not to be able to do it is really upsetting.” She’s talking about an act that most of us do without thinking: writing our own name. Emma has early-onset Parkinson’s disease and in the four years since she was diagnosed, the tremor in her right hand has grown progressively worse. Until, that is, she crossed paths with an inventor called Haiyan Zhang. The pair were brought together for a new BBC2 series, The Big Life Fix with Simon Reeve. The premise of the show is simple. A group of young engineers and designers are tasked with solving life-changing problems for people like Emma who have nowhere else to turn. For Haiyan, the challenge was: what could she do to help control Emma’s tremor? Emma first sensed something was not quite right at her father’s 60th birthday party in 2012. “I’d ignored it for about a year. I had a strange feeling in my right arm and hand – it felt a bit like I’d got a trapped nerve.” When a fellow guest noticed something amiss, Emma promised to see a doctor as a “birthday present” for her dad, who’d been nagging her to get the symptom checked out. A couple of months later, the diagnosis came back. And, as the implications became clear, Emma grew gloomier. Fixers: Ryan White, Haiyan Zhang, Simon Reeve, Ross Atkin and Yusuf Muhammad Emma says that her work as a graphic designer is not just a job, it’s central to the way she defines herself. And graphic design obviously relies on being able to draw straight lines – something that’s impossible if your arm is shaking uncontrollably. As she struggled to get her designs on paper, “I felt like crying. Because I knew that I was letting the team down. I had the ideas in my head but I just couldn’t get them to come out on paper.” Could Haiyan help? The designer, whose day job is Innovation Director at Microsoft Research Cambridge, came up with a device that sounds utterly counterintuitive. The gadget is embedded in a wristband and works by deliberately shaking the user’s arm. In doing so, it appears to confuse the brain of the person with Parkinson’s, letting them write and draw with a precision that would otherwise be utterly impossible. That’s the theory. But in practice? In the programme we see some startling initial results. We watch Emma as she writes her name for the first time in three years. Slowly, deliberately but totally successfully. Then we see her draw a near-perfect straight line. “It was an amazing feeling. It made me feel like myself again,” says Emma. It’s certainly a remarkable sight. But viewers might still wonder: is this a flash-in-the-pan TV stunt or might the solutions we see on screen prove to be truly life-changing? Could Haiyan’s invention go on to help some of the millions of people around the world with Parkinson’s? Haiyan herself is cautious but upbeat. “I think it warrants more trials. It definitely works for Emma. I’m amazed how well it works for her.” She hopes a researcher will take on the project and run with it. And Emma? She’s been using the device day in, day out, for months and says she’s thrilled by what it’s done for her. Might it one day be a piece of standard kit for people with Parkinson’s? “I really hope so. I’m really excited to be able to wear it in public – and to be proud of it. Parkinson’s affects lots of people differently. But there’s a group of people for whom this will be fantastic.” The Big Life Fix with Simon Reeve is on Wednesday 7th December at 9pm on BBC2
"I'm really quite clever" - Giles Coren on competing with his sister and his new quiz show
Coren is playing catch up with his little sister Victoria on his new game show, 500 Questions - could it be the new Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
As the presenter of 500 Questions, a new TV quiz show described by ITV as “the toughest on television”, how clever is Giles Coren? “How clever am I? I’m really quite clever,” he says without hesitation. “I mean, look, I’ve got a first-class degree from Oxford. [Not just any old first from Oxford, mind, but one of the best awarded by the university that year.] I got six out of nine papers with leading Alphas. “I have quite good general knowledge and I had a very drilled education from an early age. I do know more than most people. I know more than most journalists. I know more than most columnists on big, important newspapers.” Coren is not, he will admit, over-burdened with modesty. “I always used to boast about how clever I was,” he adds. “I was just re-reading a school report of mine the other day. My English teacher said: ‘He will do well when he realises he is not the only star shining in the firmament.’” Maybe it’s refreshing to hear someone who doesn’t buy into the traditional British default position that boastfulness is, well, vulgar. Maybe if you’ve got a light you really ought to rush out and buy a bushel to go with it. Maybe. Coren’s new show is a departure for both the presenter and for ITV. It’s his first foray into mass-audience quiz shows – having been The Times’s restaurant critic since 1993, his TV work has focused on the culinary world, with shows like Edwardian Supersize Me, which he presented alongside Sue Perkins, and the Bafta-nominated Back in Time for Dinner. And for the first time since the heyday of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, ITV is putting out a shiny-floor game show four nights this week at peak time. There’s booming music, there are pulsing laser beams, heavy drumbeats. And there’s the opportunity for ordinary people to win a wad of money – or lose it in an instant. But is it really the toughest quiz on TV? Modestly perhaps, Coren parts company with the official line. Bear in mind that his sister Victoria, three years his junior, presents Only Connect, and his brother-in-law, Alexander Armstrong, hosts Pointless. “I’m not going around saying it’s the hardest quiz show in Britain,” he smiles, “because it’s not even the hardest quiz show in my family.” Did he ask Victoria for any tips on presenting a quiz show? “Funnily enough I didn’t. Normally we talk a lot about what we do but we both don’t really listen to what the other one’s saying, so you never really know if it’s gone in. Victoria’s always incredibly busy, so I didn’t mention this. I thought I’d let her find out. “She knows now because one day she phoned me up and asked if I wanted to come around, and I said: ‘I can’t. I’m in Germany.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Oh, I’m hosting a quiz show.’” He says there was silence when he first told her. “I said: ‘Do you have any strong feelings about that?’ She said: ‘No... though I suppose I would rather it wasn’t a quiz show.” Are Giles and Victoria competitive? You bet. The day we meet, Victoria’s picture is on the front of Radio Times. This fact has not gone unnoticed. “She’s on the cover. Amazing. Of all the ironies. Typical. I get interviewed by Radio Times the week my sister’s on the cover. I’m not going to get on the cover, am I?” Giles attributes the Coren competitiveness to their father, the late satirist Alan Coren, main-stay of Radio 4’s News Quiz. “The world’s most competitive man, my dad. Wouldn’t let us win at Monopoly... he wouldn’t cut any slack for his children. My sister’s also very, very competitive but she is more concerned than I am with being liked. So she hides it away. I try to make my competitiveness part of my charm.” The late Alan Coren photographed in 1977 At its heart, 500 Questionsis simple. You choose a category, you’re given a question and you have five seconds to get it right. You go from question to question, building up a cash jackpot as you go along. But if you get three wrong answers in a row, you’re kicked off the show and the baton passes to the next contestant. Whoever is still standing at the end of the programme gets to keep the money. Everyone else gets nothing. “I think that it’s got the balance between luck and knowledge, which is how pub quizzes are,” says Coren. “And pub quizzes are much harder than people think.” Interestingly, although ITV is hoping this could be their new Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, they won’t be creating any millionaires with this show. “I was talking to ITV and they said to me that after the credit crunch and the recession, viewers weren’t interested in seeing people win £1 million. It didn’t sound convincing to me – but this is what I was told. And they research these things very heavily. “In 500 Questions, you could win £25,000 but the chances are you’ll win about £15,000. If you lose, it’s not the end of the world. They’re not taking £1 million away from you.” Here’s a strange fact: the show, based on an American format (there have already been two series over there), is recorded in Cologne. Which means that Coren is asking questions in English, to British contestants, in front of a German- speaking studio audience. Why did they not film over here? Because a German broadcaster has also bought the rights to make 500 Questions, and it was cheaper for ITV to use RTL’s set rather than build one for itself. That will no doubt change if the show is re-commissioned for a longer run, which Giles must no doubt be keeping his fingers crossed for – he would hate, above all, to be outdone by his little sister. 500 Questions starts tonight at 9pm on ITV
Andrew Neil on Brexit, Trump... and why he’s worth more than the PM
“I do almost 180 programmes a year – more than almost anybody else in the political sphere”
The politicians have a seven week break from Parliament. Are you off duty too? All the programmes I do – Daily Politics, Sunday Politics, This Week– follow the parliamentary calendar, which means I do five or six programmes a week when Parliament’s sitting and none when it isn’t. We came down to our house in Grasse, in the south of France, in July and I’m not back until Prime Minister’s Questions on 7 September. You surprised everyone when you got married last year Yes, I know. I surprised myself. How has life changed? It hasn’t actually changed at all. Susan [Nilsson, an engineer] and I had been together five years when we got married so we’d got used to each other. She’s the most accommodating person in the world, and when I start beavering away on the iPad, she gets out her laptop. She’s involved in building bridges and tunnels – much more useful than the stuff that I do. What did your neighbours in France make of the Brexit vote? They were dismayed. A few were angry. That’s died down a bit now. The result was so unexpected. On the morning of the vote, David Cameron was told he’d won by ten points. Though he was told that by the same pollsters who’d told him he had a 0.5% chance of getting an overall majority at the 2015 general election! If I were to make a random guess... you plumped for Leave? I won’t answer that. I was really pleased during the referendum that both sides regarded me as impartial. But I would say that the British establishment, which has got the biggest bloody nose of recent memory, needs to get a grip. Some publications have lost their marbles. They need to sober up. Some predictions, please. First, what will Brexit look like? My guess is we’ll have decent access to the single market. I think there’ll be some movement of labour – Britain will continue to need immigrants – but it won’t be on the same scale as now. Who will be leading the Labour Party in 12 months’ time? Jeremy Corbyn, I would guess. And how many Labour parties will there be? There’s at least a 50-50 chance of a schism. There’s such a gulf between the parliamentary party and the grassroots that it’s very hard to see how they can continue together. I never thought that the Social Democrat break-up in the 1980s would destroy the Labour Party. But this could be much more fundamental. Last prediction: who’ll win the US election? As things stand, I think you’d have to put your money on Hillary. But I’m wary about making predictions: I wouldn’t have predicted Donald Trump would become the Republican candidate, that David Cameron would get an overall majority, that Jeremy Corbyn would become the Labour leader. And I did not predict that we would vote to leave the EU. So people like me should show a little humility. Finally, a House of Commons report urged the BBC to name – and perhaps shame – all presenters who earn more than the PM’s £143,000 salary. I have no problem with that at all. I’d only put in one caveat, which is that next to the salary they should put the number of programmes we do every year. Would your name appear? Yes, it would. But if you divide my pay by the number of shows I do, I’m pretty far down the pecking order. I do almost 180 programmes a year – more than almost anybody else in the political sphere.
Clash of Loyalties: Saddam Hussein's answer to Lawrence of Arabia
Soon after he took power, the Iraqi dictator decided to make an epic movie about the birth of the nation. What happened to it?
You’re a Middle Eastern dictator looking to burnish your image. You want to tell the world that your country walks tall and that your people are noble, brave and strong. So what do you do? Well, what Saddam Hussein did just months after becoming President of Iraq in 1979, was to commission a multimillion-dollar, Hollywood-style movie portraying the birth of modern-day Iraq in 1932 and recounting how the Iraqi people escaped the clutches of evil British colonial rule. Mildly surprising perhaps, but the startling part of the story was that he signed up Oliver Reed to be the star of his propaganda film. The story behind Clash of Loyalties, as the movie was called, or Al-mas’ala Al-Kubra as it’s sometimes referred to, is a bizarre tale, from start to finish. The film – “Saddam’s version of Lawrence of Arabia”, according to one of the actors – also featured James Bolam, who was at the time appearing in the BBC’s When the Boat Comes In, and John Barron, best known as the brilliant CJ in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. And it was put together by a producer based in Surrey. Having the world’s most famous drunkard as your lead actor is bound to bring complications, and it certainly did, as we shall see, but the shoot, in Baghdad and the Iraqi desert, faced a much more fundamental problem than that. A few months after the paperwork was signed, but before a single scene could be filmed, Saddam invaded neighbouring Iran, sparking a bloody war that was to rage for eight years. But the Iraqi dictator – then, of course, an ally of the UK – wasn’t going to let a mere war prevent his movie from being made. He’d invested millions in the project – it had roughly the same budget as Return of the Jedi, which was also being made around that time – and was determined to see it through. As a result, when filming began in 1981, the cast and crew had to work their way around a real war that was raging a few miles away. Fighter jets would fly overhead on their way to the front, tanks would rumble past on the streets. Producer Lateif Jorephani recalls: “I had 140 people out in Iraq during a war. These people were accustomed to making movies in Shepperton, Pinewood, Hollywood – not being in the middle of nowhere while real missiles and bombs were going off all over the place.” Stephan Chase, who played an army captain in the movie, says that until he flew out, he’d not paid any attention to the fact that Iraq was at war. But he realised things were not normal while on board the plane flying him, Reed and other cast members out to Iraq. “There’d been lots of drink, some arm wrestling and some press-ups on the plane but, apart from that, nothing untoward. Until, that is, we looked out of the window and saw that a fighter plane was escorting our jumbo,” he says. “I thought, ‘They’d only put a fighter jet up there if they were seriously worried that we might get shot down’. We landed in the middle of the night, in total darkness. It was scary.” On set, the war brought other complications. Some comical, some far less so. Scenes had to be reshot after local actors suddenly went missing. “We’d start a sequence with an Iraqi actor, and come the second or third day, he suddenly didn’t appear. He’d been called up [into the army],” recalls crew member Roger MacDonald. “Then three or four weeks later we’d get a message back saying the poor actor had been killed.” Meanwhile, war or no war, there was Oliver Reed to deal with. He’d flown in with his 17-year-old girlfriend – later to become his second wife – and a raging thirst. Stephan Chase recalls how Ollie would often be “pickled by the hotel pool in the morning, dreaming up things for us all to do”. This might involve being dangled by his ankles from a hotel balcony, or simply starting a fight. Jorephani remembers: “One day Ollie was in the restaurant, got hold of an empty wine bottle and urinated in it. Then he called the waiter over, and asked him to send the bottle over to the next table, ‘with my compliments’.” The result? An overturned table, fists thrown – and a demand, which was later rescinded, from the Iraqi government that Reed be fired. “Ollie was a weapon of mass destruction,” says one of his colleagues. But Reed wasn’t the only actor in trouble. Fellow cast member Marc Sinden, son of actor Donald, was in his early 20s when he got a role on the film. Before he flew out to Iraq, he says he was approached by a UK government official and told that the security services would be “very interested in seeing my holiday snaps”. “I said, ‘Of course. What sort of holiday snaps are you interested in?’ They said, ‘Radio communications towers, palaces...’” Sadly, Sinden’s snaps led to a sharp tap on the shoulder from an Iraqi secret policeman – and three days spent in a grim cell. His release only came when he told his captors how he and Ollie Reed had been dining with the Iraqi president just ten days earlier. So much for the off-screen drama. But what happened to the finished movie? It was shown at several film festivals but never secured a distribution deal. It’s quite possible that no more than a few hundred people have ever seen it. Then, when Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990, any hopes for it were killed stone dead. Today, one of the only known copies of the movie is in Jorephani’s garage in Surrey. So, is it any good? “It could have been,” says Jorephani. “Ollie was absolutely brilliant. And James Bolam was great. But the director wasn’t experienced in shooting movies and unfortunately, it could have been a great deal better.” And all these years on, how does Jorephani reflect on the experience of making a movie for Saddam Hussein? “Today, more than 30 years later, one can sit back and say it was a great deal of fun,” he says. “But, believe me, it wasn’t.” Saddam Goes to Hollywood: Sunday 9pm C4
A woman missing, a body never found and a husband attempting to fake his own death: Mark Williams-Thomas on his ITV true-crime series The Investigator
It started with an out-of-the-blue email from a woman with a horrifying story to tell – and a big favour to ask. But before that, we need to go back three decades... In June 1985, Sam Gillingham, then a teenager, got home from a day out with her father to find a note on the kitchen table. It was short and bleak, and accompanied by her mother’s wedding ring. It read: “I’ve had enough and I’m leaving. And I’m not coming back.” Veronica Packman – known as Carole – was never seen again. To this day, no one knows for sure what happened to her. Her disappearance was first treated as just that – she’d left, voluntarily, from the family home to start afresh. But a decade later, dad Russell Causley – he’d changed his surname to that of his new partner – got in trouble with the police. He was convicted of an insurance fraud and sent to prison. And the nature of his crime? He’d attempted to fake his own death. This aroused suspicions in the minds of the police. Could a man who pretends he is dead be taken at face value when his wife has disappeared from the face of the earth? Despite the fact that Carole’s body has never been found, Causley was charged with her murder. In 1996, he was found guilty. Then in 2003, his conviction was quashed, only for him to be found guilty a second time, at a retrial a year later. Today, Causley is in jail, serving a life sentence. In public, he has always claimed to be innocent. His wife ran off “with a man in a red Porsche”, he said. She was, he claimed, working in Germany, France, Switzerland, Malta. Today, the convicted murderer still refuses to tell his daughter the whereabouts of her mother’s body. Which is why Sam, now 47, turned to renowned investigator Mark Williams-Thomas. If his name rings a bell, it’s because he’s the investigative reporter – a former police detective – who unmasked Jimmy Savile as a paedophile in 2012. Williams-Thomas says, “Sam told me: ‘My mum vanished 30 years ago, my dad’s in jail for her murder – and I’m still looking for answers. I need help.’ ” Williams-Thomas is approached a lot – “from people who are sane and not sane” – but this one stood out. He promised to look into her mother’s case. The result is an extraordinary four-part dramatised documentary series that follows the TV genre lead set by the acclaimed Netflix series Making of a Murderer and Sky Atlantic’s The Jinx. Strangely, you might think, it has been co-produced by Simon Cowell’s production company Syco, and Cowell has been actively involved in the making of the programmes. The story was strange from the very beginning, even before Williams-Thomas started digging. On the surface, the couple at the centre of this mystery were living an ordinary middle-class life. They lived in a large house on the outskirts of Bournemouth on England’s south coast, and had well-paid jobs in the aerospace industry. But behind closed doors, the set-up was highly unconventional. Causley was a serial philanderer. One day, he decided to move his new mistress, a young colleague named Patricia, into the family home – while his wife Carole remained under the same roof. It appears, though we can’t know for sure, that Carole may have been happy with this unorthodox arrangement, initially at least. More confusingly, Sam admits in the programme that she grew closer to her father’s mistress, and increasingly distant from her mother, who soon moved into the spare bedroom. Eventually, it seems, Carole lost patience. Just before she disappeared, she went to see a divorce lawyer. That is the last time that she was seen alive. So what happened? Sam won’t rest until she knows that fate of her mother. She says in the programme that Williams-Thomas’s investigation “is my best, last shot”. And what are the conclusions of the inquiries of Williams-Thomas? Understandably, he does not want to give the game away before the rest of us have watched the whole series. Williams-Thomas’s investigation takes him to Canada and the Channel Islands, and he also speaks to witnesses in the United States, Germany, France and Italy. He also manages to obtain tapes of Causley’s original police interviews – tapes that were not even played to the trial juries. It’s chilling to hear the accused man’s voice claiming to investigating officers: “She’s the best friend I ever had. We did not have an acrimonious departure. Definitely not.” RT has seen only the first instalment, but it’s clear early on that the case is going to take some very strange turns. At the end of episode one, we discover that shortly after Carole went missing, a woman walked into Bournemouth police station and identified herself to officers as Carole Packman. The woman said she was safe and well. And that was that. "In 1985, all it took for the case to be closed was for one person to walk into a police station and to say she was Carole,” says Williams-Thomas. “No checks made, no questions asked.” Could it have been the real Carole? And if it wasn’t, who was it? And who had sent her? More intriguingly, Williams-Thomas reveals that the woman was accompanied by a teenage girl of about the same age that Sam would have been at the time. In the programme, Williams-Thomas carefully asks Sam if she was the teenager at the police station that day. “Absolutely not. I never, ever saw my mother again after the time she disappeared. That was not me.” It gets odder. A year after her disappearance, a woman in Canada began work in the aerospace industry – Carole Packman’s chosen line of work – using the name “Carole Packman”. Again – was this the real Carole? Or was someone else involved in cooking up a fake identity? Williams-Thomas won’t reveal his conclusions now. But he says, tantalisingly, “I’ve investigated many cases. But I have never dealt with one so complex and twisted.”
David Harewood: I had a shocker on the set of The Night Manager
The former Homeland actor splits his time between London and LA, and admits the tough commute meant he was not prepared for filming on BBC1's Le Carré thriller
“I seem to be cornering the market in African American CIA agents,” smiles David Harewood. Best known as hard-nosed spy boss David Estes in the US series Homeland, Harewood is back as a CIA man in The Night Manager. But, when RT meets Harewood on set – he’s filming a scene in a smart-looking pub in London’s East End – the Birmingham-born actor has been having a tough time. Two days earlier, he tweeted: “Between me and you, I think I must have dropped my talent on plane over here cos I've had a shocking start.” View oEmbed on the source website Then: “If I'd have been a footballer today there is no doubt I would have been dragged off after 20 minutes. I had an absolute shocker.” So what happened? “Well I’d been working in America – until 4am on Friday, then 3am on Saturday – then I flew here and went straight on set. I hadn’t seen my kids four months and I was jetlagged. And I was just not mentally there. I couldn’t remember my lines, I couldn’t focus. Literally, I was sweating.” The really surprising thing is that you’re prepared to reveal this to your 30,000 followers on Twitter? “We all have bad days. I think it’s quite interesting that some actors don’t want to talk about that.” Failure, he says, is not “the opposite of success, it’s an integral part of success.” And how’s filming now that the jet lag has lifted and you’ve seen your daughters (Maize, 12, and Raven, 10)? “I’m absolutely loving it.” So who is Joel Steadman, Harewood’s character in The Night Manager? Harewood doesn’t want to spoil the plot, beyond saying that he “works in the spy game and travels the world trying to put away people who are trading in weapons”. But he’s very different from Harewood’s role in Homeland, “who never smiled once in the two seasons I played him.” These days, Harewood splits his days between LA – where his career is booming – and London. The boy from working-class Brum has done well for himself. So well, in fact, that his former comprehensive school, now the Washwood Heath Academy, has named one of its houses after its star pupil (“Harewood House”, not to be confused with the stately home in Yorkshire). Yet, he fears acting is becoming more difficult for people from his background. Look around The Night Manager: the two main stars, Hugh Laurie and Tom Hiddleston, both went to Eton (and John le Carre taught there!). And Damian Lewis, who starred with Harewood in Homeland, also went to Eton. Does he feel like he’s surrounded by Old Etonians? “Chased by Etonians? Yeah. Well, the world is chased by Etonians!” Harewood, who went from his comprehensive straight to Rada, says: “There’s no way in the world I would be able to go to drama school now. I got a grant from Birmingham Council – I auditioned behind somebody playing the spoons – but that whole system is gone now. So I think it would be very hard for a young black kid from Smallheath in Birmingham to get to Rada. “I’ve got no problem with the public school boys getting through – but it’s a shame that now the majority of those coming through are guys who have had that helping hand. That’s not to say they’re not talented – they’re extremely talented all of them – but whether or not a young kid in my position could get there now, I’m not so sure.”
Where are the Dragons' Den success stories now?
Richard Osman on what happened to some of the Den's most notable alumni after the cameras stopped rolling
“It feels like you’re watching a game show,” says Richard Osman, “but you know that it’s all real: it’s real people, with real money and they’re talking to entrepreneurs with real dreams. It can be a life- changing encounter for the people who come on. And you see the terror in their eyes.” The Pointless presenter is trying to explain the enduring appeal of Dragons’ Den, the BBC2 programme that’s still going strong after 11 years and 13 series. This week Osman presents a documentary looking at some of the show’s biggest hits – and a few of its misses. He also catches up with some of the entrepreneurs who have walked away with the Dragons’ cash. He meets the pasta manufacturer whose pitch nearly ended when he broke down in tears (he now sells more than 800,000 packets of noodles a week); the 18-year-old inventor who has gone on to run a £10 million company; and the husband and wife team looking to emulate the success of the show’s greatest ever hit: Levi Root’s famous Reggae Reggae sauce, which is now worth an estimated £65 million! NOODLES OF CASH HOW IT WENT IN THE DEN: Everything went wrong for Ross Mendham — until the very end of his pitch. He was presenting Bare Naked, his brand of premium low-carb noodles, in 2013. Within a few minutes, he’d struggled over his numbers, admitting to the Dragons: “You’ll have to forgive me. Maths wasn’t my strong point at school.” Then, when asked about his home life, he broke down in tears. He explained that his wife Kelly had suffered a miscarriage — her third — shortly before he’d set off for the studio. Peter Jones told him coldly: “You’re not here for sympathy, you’re here to get an investment.” Incredibly, he then went on to offer a £60,000 investment in Ross’s company. WHAT HAPPENED NEXT: Ross recalls: “I went to hug Peter, and I thought: ‘You’ve changed my life.’” Since the programme Ross has gone from shifting 260 packets of noodles a week to around 16,000. The company is worth more than 15 times what it was. And, rather brilliantly, Kelly went on to give birth to a baby boy. RICHARD’S VERDICT: “This was a perfect example of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. Ross just fell to pieces, but he told me that what Peter said was the best thing that could’ve happened. I think Peter spotted that Ross was going to lose this opportunity if he let himself become too emotional. So Peter saved him.” THE NEXT REGGAE REGGAE SAUCE? HOW IT WENT IN THE DEN: Ben Ansah and wife Sue Youn came to the Den last year with a home-made cooking sauce that Sue Youn used to create at her mother’s house. They left the Den with a £50,000 investment from Peter Jones — but not before he’d pushed new Dragon, Sarah Willingham, out of the way. “At the end of the day,” says Jones immodestly, “it’s a lesson for Sarah: she knows who the lead Dragon is.” WHAT HAPPENED NEXT: Yogiyo sauces are no longer made in a domestic kitchen — they’re mass produced in Korea and on sale here in Sainsbury’s. Ben says: “This is point zero of a new journey. How big can this become?” RICHARD’S VERDICT: The shadow of Levi Roots hangs heavy over Dragons’ Den. Peter Jones and Richard Farleigh made so much money out of Reggae Reggae sauce that the moment another sauce comes up, they fall under its spell. Ben and Sue Youn are super-smart. And their product is good — if it does become the next Reggae Reggae sauce, everybody involved will become extremely rich. And Sarah will be gutted.” THE TEENAGE TYCOON HOW IT WENT IN THE DEN: Jordan Daykin was just 18 when he appeared on Dragons’ Den in 2014, pitching an unsexy, but useful, device that fixes curtain rails and the like to plasterboard (pictured below). Daykin’s prospects didn’t initially look good when Dragon Peter Jones yanked hard at a radiator and pulled it off the wall — and then pulled out of the bidding. But the teenager soon recovered and impressed Deborah Meaden so much that she invested £80,000 in his business. WHAT HAPPENED NEXT: Less than two years later, Daykin’s GripIt Fixings company is worth an estimated £10 million, and Meaden’s £80,000 investment is now worth around £2.5 million. RICHARD’S VERDICT: “When Peter pulled the radiator down, Deborah was not put off because Jordan explained why it had happened. There’s something about him. He’s incredibly impressive. She took a punt on him and it’s really paid off. His life has really changed since he went into the Den. You sit in his office and watch the people working for him — and they adore him. And that radiator coming off the wall? It cost Peter a fortune!”
Bill Turnbull: 'I don't know why people want to make you feel so awkward about having belief'
The early-morning chat show talks about his Christian faith, life after BBC Breakfast – and bees
After 15 years in the same job, your boss should probably take you at your word. I meet Bill Turnbull on a bleak Tuesday morning at the BBC Breakfast studios in Salford. He’s just come off air, he’s perky, warm, upbeat. But before we get going... there’s something we need to get out of the way. Bill’s just returned from a day off work. Yesterday, out of the blue, he called in sick. Which wouldn’t normally raise an eyebrow, were it not for the fact that the day in question just happened to be his 60th birthday. Did the celebrations get a little bit out of hand, perhaps? “No, it wasn’t a hangover,” says the presenter. Sure, they had people round to their house at the weekend to celebrate, but that doesn’t explain his absence from the studio: “I had a stomach bug. It was utterly miserable, to be honest.” Given the straightforwardness he goes on to display in our interview – about his schooldays at Eton, about swearing live on air, about his life as a practising Christian – I don’t doubt his explanation for a moment. We’re here because Bill Turnbull is saying goodbye to Breakfast after a decade and a half on the early-morning sofa (he’ll be replaced three days a week by Football Focus presenter and devout Christian Dan Walker). He may have reached 60, but “don’t call it retirement! No.” He will continue to pop up on TV, both in his current berth at Songs of Praise and in a new BBC1 daytime quiz called Think Tank... and, he hopes, plenty of other places too. “This,” says Turnbull, “is just a change of direction.” True, but it’s a big one. He and his wife Sarah McCombie will leave their rented home in the Peak District – they moved north after Breakfast relocated to Salford in 2012 – to a permanent base in Suffolk. There’ll be more time for family, and for his well-known hobby of bee-keeping. And, of course, he will begin to train his body to live – and sleep – like a normal human being again. He won’t miss the early starts. “At the moment, the first alarm goes off at 3.35am. The second alarm is set for 3.36 but I very rarely need that. I get up, shower, shave. I do ten minutes of yoga, then leave the house at 4:20am.” Has he ever slept in? Only twice in 15 years. And even then he didn’t miss the start of the show at 6am. “The one time I didn’t wake up, I said to the driver afterwards: ‘Why didn’t you ring the doorbell?’ He said: ‘I was worried the dogs would bark and wake everybody up.’ I said: ‘That’s kind of the point.’” The high points of his 15 years on Breakfast? He picks a random selection: the 2012 Olympics (“like a big party, day after day”), reporting from New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, meeting Eric Burden of the Animals. The low points? A painful (and hilarious) 2008 interview down the line from the seafront at Poole harbour with Bill Oddie, at the end of which Turnbull expressed the wish that Oddie might fall in the sea. So when did it first cross Turnbull’s mind to leave all this behind? Wasn’t he tempted when BBC bosses ordered the Breakfast team to up sticks and move to Salford? “It must have crossed my mind to leave then, but I suppose I was intrigued by the experiment. The challenge of it... can you move three hours of news and current affairs television 200 miles up the motorway without missing a single programme and make it work?” So can you? Yes, he says, they’ve proved the doubters wrong. “You get guests on the programme, you’re still covering all the main stories and, if anything, the audience has gone up slightly.” At the time of the move, Adam Bullimore, then the deputy but now the editor of Breakfast, said that the show’s “tone of voice might change a bit”. Has it? “Well,” smiles Turnbull, “we haven’t put on northern accents. No, I don’t think the tone of voice has changed.” Ah, yes, tone of voice. Most viewers probably won’t realise that Turnbull’s background is a rather privileged one. Turnbull went to Eton – he was in the same school year as one boy who entered the Cabinet (Oliver Letwin), one who went on to edit The Daily Telegraph (Charles Moore) and one – Justin Welby – who is now the Archbishop of Canterbury. “When Justin was appointed, I remember thinking: ‘He looks familiar’, and then when I did an interview with him, I said: ‘Were you – the phrase is – “at school”?’ He said yes. We worked out we were both in Mr Armstrong’s class for English A-level, but we never actually spoke.” Some people might wonder how a product of the grandest school in the country – fees are currently £36,000 a year – could share the concerns of a TV viewer about to set off to work in a shop or factory. Turnbull takes umbrage. Despite the fact that he was at school with “duke’s children, earls, lords, all that” – and that he has three Christian names, one of which is Jolyon – “just because you go to Eton doesn’t make you posh. Of course not. No! “It irritates me when people just look at where I went to school and form a judgement,” he says. “Because I’m not a toff. In fact I felt rather socially inferior at Eton. I was definitely near the bottom of the ladder. “It was never an issue until David Cameron” – also an Old Etonian, of course – “became prime minister. Never once. When I started working for the BBC back in the early 80s, it never came up. Only in the past couple of years have people suddenly gone, ‘Oh, you went to Eton.’ Where you go to school doesn’t affect your attitude – or shouldn’t affect your attitude – to life, people, things that happen. Not going to a comprehensive doesn’t disqualify me from reading the news.” If there’s one thing an Eton education should have taught Turnbull (and it has, he’s charming), it’s manners. Which makes it all the odder that he is one of a very small number of people who have uttered the rudest swear-word – the dreaded “c-word” – live on TV. It happened last July. “I was reading emails off the screen. And the words ‘clients’ and ‘customers’ came up in close succession. Now, there are two ways you can confuse these words. One is to say ‘cliestomers’ and the other one isn’t. And it happened. Normally there would be some kind of response from the gallery. Either a gasp of horror or laughter. But nobody noticed. I thought I’d got away with it.” Until, that is, he got out of the studio – and news of his slip-up was all over the internet. “By the time I got home, there was even a newspaper in Malaysia reporting it.” Turnbull knew he needed to issue an apology, so he did – on Twitter. Was there a BBC inquiry into the matter? “No. Why would there be?” And so to Turnbull’s plans for the future. What does it hold? The daytime quiz aside, there will also, he hopes, be documentaries, work on the radio and who knows what else. One thing will stay the same, though – he will continue to be one of the presenters of Songs of Praise. (Interesting note: at Eton, the future Archbishop of Canterbury wasn’t in the choir; the future TV presenter was.) One of the things he says he’ll do more of when he leaves Breakfast behind and moves home is go to church. (He has, in the past, led Evensong at his local church.) It’s unusual, I say, to hear a prominent TV presenter talk in public about their religious belief. He thinks that’s a shame. “I always say I have faith. I have very strong beliefs. But we are embarrassed in Britain about [saying that]. When we lived in America it was the exception not to go to church. Church was absolutely packed and it was wonderful. But here there’s something about our culture that makes people feel as if they have to apologise for having faith. I think people are actually a lot more religious than they let on. I think secretly, within their hearts, they have beliefs that they keep to themselves.” In the US, I say, it would be impossible to stand for president without saying you’re a practising Christian. Would he prefer it that way here? He answers a slightly different question. “I prefer the fact that there you don’t have to apologise for being religious. I don’t know why people want to make you feel so awkward about having belief. I don’t understand it. Sometimes here if you express a belief in God, people will say: ‘Oh I’m sorry, I just swore.’ They treat you as if you’re lily white. That’s just ridiculous. I’m as human as the next person – my friends certainly know that.” Bill Turnbull? Swear? Most of us assumed he only does that on television.
Olivia Colman: Pregnancy didn't slow me down on The Night Manager
The actress said that being a pregnant spy was no problem for her during filming for BBC1's thriller. Remembering lines on the other hand...
If you’re familiar with the original John le Carré novel, you’ll notice a few changes when you see the BBC’s dramatisation of The Night Manager. For a start, in the TV series the intelligence officer at the heart of the drama — named Burr — is female (on screen, she’s Angela; in the book, Leonard). Secondly, in the TV adaptation, Burr is pregnant... a feat that even the most daring of male spies would struggle to pull off. Why is Burr pregnant? There was, reveals Olivia Colman, who plays Angela Burr, no mention of it in the script. But after the Broadchurch star was given the part, she found out she had a baby on the way. (We speak during filming, when Colman is five months pregnant. Colman’s third child, a daughter, was born in August.) Colman admits that her pregnancy led to a difficult conversation. Colman: “I went to see Susanne [Bier, the director]. thinking, ‘Oh God, should I mention it in the first meeting?’ And I thought: ‘I can’t lie.’ Which is why I’d be a rubbish spy. “She said, ‘Oh... right...’ And didn’t look that pleased. “But then she said, ‘You know, just go with it for a minute. Remember the film Fargo and Frances McDormand? The pregnancy added to the drama: the domesticity versus the extraordinary nature of her job. And I think it adds a weird power to this part, too.’” What difference has Colman’s pregnancy made to the storyline? The answer — not a lot, “Beyond the odd person saying to Burr: ‘Aren’t you meant to slow down during pregnancy?’, to which she responds: ‘B***** off.’” 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. There is, however, one rather amusing change: Colman says that more chairs have been written into the script — so that she can deliver her lines without having to stand up for hours on end. But, she says honestly, there’s one other difference too — for Colman, the actor. “I just can’t retain my lines like I normally would. I’ve got a bit of nappy brain going on. There are an awful lot of script changes that happen. It can change the day before, on the day. It fills me with fear: ‘Oh Christ, I’ve barely got the script in my head and now I’ve got to change it.’ So it is a little bit hanging by my fingernails.”
David Attenborough presents the biggest dinosaur ever
If you thought the diplodocus was big, meet a truly ginormous new dinosaur
The animal who stars in David Attenborough's latest programme stands apart from any of those you've seen in Life On Earth or Living Planet. For a start this creature has been dead for more than 100 million years. He's also the largest creature to have walked the earth. In Attenborough and the Giant Dinosaur, Sir David tells the story of a jaw-dropping discovery that sprang from a chance observation. One day an Argentinian farm labourer working on the barren plains of Patagonia spotted something unusual. There appeared to be a bone sticking out of the ground. It was, it soon transpired, the thigh bone of a dinosaur. And it was huge – nearly 8ft long. Cue much excitement from scientists around the world. And a dig that went on to unearth more than 200 massive bones, all of them from a hitherto unknown species. View oEmbed on the source website Attenborough flew to Patagonia to meet the palaeontologists who had dug up the bones and he watched while they built a life- sized replica of the giant dinosaur’s skeleton. As he explains in the programme, our knowledge of physics and biology is now so advanced – and the haul of bones so comprehensive – that scientists can confidently predict the size of the creature. Their conclusions are astounding. The animal, from the genus titanosaurus, would have weighed nearly 70 tons and measured about 20ft from toe to shoulder – about twice the height of an African elephant. And that’s before you factor in it's incredible 40ft-long neck. From nose to tail the titanosaurus measured 120ft - four London buses put end to end!For comparison, "Dippy", the famous diplodocus at the National History Museum in London is 90ft-long (equivalent to merely three London buses) Attenborough says he's been fascinated by fossils ever since he was a lad, when he would regularly cycle 20 miles in order to unearth them. “I’ve always loved fossils. I grew up in Leicestershire, where there’s an iron limestone full of ammonites and belemnites (prehistoric sea creatures) and a few fish, if you were really lucky. When I was 12 years old I couldn’t think of anything more romantic than cycling to a quarry, taking a boulder, hitting it into two pieces... and there in your hand is the most beautiful and perfect shell you’ve seen in all your life. It’s the first time it’s seen the sunshine for 150 million years – and you’re the first human being ever to have seen it. I think that’s pretty exciting.” Above,Young David excavating in Madagascar The look of wonderment on his face in the programme as he first “meets” the 100m-year old dinosaur bones shows that his love of fossils hasn’t changed in the nearly eight decades that have passed since then. But the journey to Argentina was rather more gruelling than his care-free days in Leicestershire. After a nearly 14-hour flight to Buenos Aires – the longest non-stop trip on British Airways’ schedule – he then had to travel a further 800 miles south, bringing the total journey time to 21 hours. And he did the return trip twice. Isn’t that tough to contend with at the age of 89? “It’s just boring. But your doctor will tell you it doesn’t do your body a lot of good.” But he needed to travel there (rather than just report from London) so that he could see for himself the progress of scientists as they calculated and built a life-sized replica of the “new” dinosaur. And, in any case, the farmer’s family – who are relishing the attention of the world’s scientific community – were delighted to welcome him. “They were very kind to us. They let me sleep in their house.” So how confident can we be about the palaeontologists’ claim that this new species is the biggest animal ever to have walked the Earth? “Oh, you can’t be totally confident,” says Attenborough, “because somebody else made such a claim about ten years ago and they thought they were confident. But as to its actual size, it’s not just down to imagination. They’ve found more than 200 bones – that is extremely unusual for a dinosaur. And there are ways of deducing size from the bones – and we know that nature doesn’t build things that have no value.” In other words, nature would only create a thigh that can support a 70-ton animal if that’s what it needed to do. View oEmbed on the source website But we don’t know whether the animals would have grown even larger than the scientists’ calculations, because “we can tell from the bones that were found that they weren’t fully grown”. What else do we know about this beast? Well, as a vegetarian, it would have needed to eat the equivalent of a builder’s skip full of branches and leaves every day. And how would a creature this big and cumbersome manage to mate? “You can get some idea from knowing how rhinoceroses and how elephants mate: not belly to belly, but belly to back.” And why did these huge dinosaurs die in this one spot in Patagonia? We can’t know for sure, explains Sir David, but the bones that have been found were, in fact, from seven different animals, whose deaths most probably occurred hundreds of years apart. So this isn’t the site of some dino massacre. Finally, a cheeky question to the grand old man of television. The word "dinosaur" is often used pejoratively to describe people. Would it be a fair description – in some aspects at least – for Sir David Attenborough OM CH CVO CBE FRS? “I’m not a great fan of new technology. I don’t change my phone every time the bell rings,” he admits. “But no, I’m not a dinosaur. I may be past my time, that is quite true. But people think of dinosaurs as great big lumbering things. And I hope I’m not that.”
The real-life construction of the railways inspired the new ITV drama
The story of how Britain’s railways came to traverse the country’s least hospitable landscapes is not a dry lesson in 19th-century history. It is, in some ways, our Wild West. Like the frontiersfolk sweeping across America at the same time, the Victorian construction workers were taming the wilderness and creating the template for a modern nation. And yes, there were horses by their side, as well as saloon bar shacks where they could slake their thirst. Here’s how it worked. Imagine you need to get a railway line across a large valley. The train company buys the land and, virtually overnight, it plonks an instant “city” (a shanty town of prefabricated wooden huts) in the middle of nowhere to house the workers who will build a viaduct. And here’s what’s most amazing. Once the building work is over, every piece of the shanty town is dismantled, every last piece of wood is scooped up, and every person leaves. The caravan moves on to the next place – ready for a new shanty town to arrive and then disappear. This is what happened for real at Ribblehead, in the Yorkshire Dales, 17 miles east of Morecambe, between 1870 and 1875. View oEmbed on the source website It’s not known how many of these settlements – which often housed 1,000 people at a time – were created in Victorian Britain, but there were scores of them across the country and each was self-sufficient. They had pubs, boarding houses, sometimes a school, church, post office, library and hospital. Even the thousands of bricks that the men used to build the viaducts and bridges were made in brickworks on-site. (Every shanty town also had a supply of “dolly mops” – on-site prostitutes.) ITV’s period drama Jericho, which stars Jessica Raine, is named after a real shanty town that grew up to build the Ribblehead Viaduct that still stands today, 100ft high, spanning 24 arches and carrying train passengers and freight from Leeds to Carlisle and beyond. At its peak, 7,000 navvies were working on the line, nearly 1,000 of whom lived in Jericho and surrounding settlements – making the temporary towns much bigger than the nearby villages and hamlets of today. Yet not a single wooden hut remains. “It’s strangely magical that a town appeared from nowhere and then disappeared again over-night,” says Jericho’s writer, Steve Thompson. There are, he says, a few tiny signs at Ribblehead of some of the buildings’ foundations, “but other than that, you’re just aware that a town was there – and that it vanished. That’s really peculiar and strangely poetic.” View oEmbed on the source website Less mystical is the danger the men faced every day. Health and safety had not been invented as a workplace concept – industrial accidents were commonplace. Yet the biggest killer was not misadventure but disease. One smallpox epidemic at Ribblehead killed 80. Meanwhile, the dirty drinking water was perhaps the most dangerous element of the building site – which helps explain why “beer was drunk for breakfast, lunch and dinner,” according to Thompson. Whole families died and were buried, often in unmarked graves. A plaque at St Leonard’s Church in the hamlet of Chapel-le-Dale is dedicated to “the memory of the many men, women and children resident in this parish who died through accident or disease during the construction of the Settle to Carlisle Railway”. Thompson explains: “Death was ever-present. It was part of the rhythm of their lives. People could go to work and not come back that night.” Tony Freschini, a retired rail engineer credited with saving the Settle-to-Carlisle line when it was threatened with closure in the late 1980s, brings home the achievement of these builders: “You look at the line and you can’t help but be impressed by what these people did in about six years. Today you wouldn’t get a motorway built in that time. And yet they did it all those years ago on horseback and brawn. It’s not bad, is it?” Jericho continues on ITV tonight (Thursday 14th January) at 9.00pm
15 facts you might not know about the Teletubbies
From the show's original name to Tinky Winky getting sacked, here are some secrets from behind the scenes...
The Teletubbies are back — and this time they're taking selfies. So here are 15 things you might be surprised to know about the iconic kids show... 1) Even today, with no publicity or new shows for 14 years, the Teletubbies YouTube channel attracts 65 million views each month. 2) Anne Wood and Andrew Davenport jointly created the show. In December 2013 they sold the rights to the Teletubbies name and their production company Ragdoll to a Canadian company, DHX Media, for £17.4 million. 3) Both the new and the old Teletubbies are enormous. Po is six feet tall, Dipsy eight feet, Laa-Laa eight feet, six inches and Tinky Winky ten feet. 4) Between 1997 and 2001, the Teletubbies appeared in 365 episodes. The programme was sold to 120 territories and translated into 45 languages. More than 33 million DVDs have been sold. 5) Pui Fan Lee played Po — the red, so-called “cutest” Teletubby — in the original shows, before becoming a star of CBeebies in her own right in series such as Show Me Show Me. She has trained the new Teletubby actors. 6) In 2001, Pui played a raunchy lesbian in the Channel 4 show Metrosexuality. “I didn’t take the lesbian role to be deliberately controversial,” she said. “Yes, I was Po. But I am an actress, too.” 7) The producers have brought back the original costume designer from early retirement because, as executive producer Maddy Darrall explains, “We didn’t want people to think, ‘It looks a bit like a Teletubby.’ These ARE the Teletubbies.” There is one difference, however — the Teletubbies’ faces are made of a new, silkier material that works better on high-definition TV. 8) Working conditions have improved for the actors. Hidden inside the wobbly bottom of each Teletubby there’s now a secret collapsible seat, which means that the performer can sit down between takes without having to remove their costume. 9) In 2002 it was revealed that police officers applying to join the Metropolitan Police’s Special Branch were asked to name all four Teletubbies. The entrance exam was, said a spokesman, “designed to ensure candidates have a broad-based knowledge in a number of areas”. 10) The interiors set of the Tubby dome is at the same studios — Twickenham — where John Cleese filmed A Fish Called Wanda and the Beatles made A Hard Day’s Night. The dome is an inflatable tent. Every night, the pump is switched off and the walls and ceiling collapse until they’re needed again. 11) Back in the late 1990s, all the outside sequences were shot on a real grass hill on a farm in Warwickshire. So many sightseers flocked to pay homage to Tinky Winky and co that the landowner, Rosemary Harding, was forced to create a pond on the site of Teletubbyland. “People were jumping fences and crossing cattle fields,” she said. “We’re glad to see the back of it.” 12) In 1999, the American TV evangelist Jerry Falwell denounced the show for secretly “role modelling a gay lifestyle” — because Tinky Winky (“whose voice is obviously that of a boy”) carries a handbag, is purple (“the gay pride colour”) and has an antenna shaped like a triangle (“the gay pride symbol”). Falwell’s comments knocked dead merchandise sales in the southern states, but as co-creator Anne Wood told RT last year: “It was so insulting. Children’s television is about love, it’s got nothing to do with sex at all.” 13) The “Sun Baby”, rising over the horizon all giggly, is in the new version. But it’s a different baby. The original tot was recently revealed to be Jess Smith, now a 20-year-old student studying dance at Canterbury Christ Church University but, at the time of filming, just nine months old. So how did Smith get the job? Her health visitor suggested her to the production team. 14) The Teletubbies were originally going to be called Teleteddies. 15) Dave Thompson, the original Tinky Winky, was “asked to leave” the role at the end of the first run of episodes. Why? His ”interpretation of the role was not acceptable”. At the time Thompson, now a rather rude stand-up comic, responded: “I am proud of my work for them. I was always the one to test out the limitations of the costume. I was the first to fall off my chair and roll over. I took all the risks.” Teletubbies is on weekdays at 7.25 am on CBeebies
Teletubbies creator Anne Wood introduces CBeebies' new stars: the Twirlywoos
Meet Great BigHoo, Toodloo, Chickedy and Chick - but why won't Wood be watching the Teletubbies remake?
If you’ve brought the likes of Roland Rat, Tinky Winky and Igglepiggle into people’s homes, what do you do next? Over the past four decades, Anne Wood, 77, has created or produced some of the best-loved television shows for pre-school children. Now she's back with a new set of characters. Meet Great BigHoo, Toodloo, Chickedy and Chick, four vividly coloured bird-like creatures – and the stars of Twirlywoos, a show that Wood describes as a "situation comedy for three-to-four-year-olds". The question for her – and for CBeebies, which has bought the rights to broadcast 50 episodes of the new series – is: will today’s children (and parents and grandparents) take to these characters with as much relish as their predecessors did to the Teletubbies? The names help with this, of course. How did Wood arrive at names like Great BigHoo and, Toodloo? She’s not quite sure, though the “hoo” part came from a bird’s call, and after that, “There needs to be a sort of rhythm to it and a certain amount of alliteration.” In fact, the show itself was originally going to be called Oodle-Oo, until her lawyer unearthed a similar name in an obscure corner of American television. View oEmbed on the source website Twirlywoos uses stop-frame animation rather than hand puppets or men and women waddling about in funny suits. “It’s particularly appropriate for the young because it’s so tactile,” she says, harking back to the 1970s heyday of Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin’s Clangers and Bagpuss. “There’s a charm to it which other things don’t have.” In this, Wood is moving directly against the fashion in children’s TV. A whole host of old favourites are being remade, and a vast majority of the new shows have opted for computer animation even if the originals on which they were based used puppets (for example, Thunderbirds) or stop-frame (The Wombles). Wood doesn’t sound enthusiastic at the return of such shows. “I’m a bit sad. It comes down to the times we’re in: people feel safer remaking hits of the past rather than investing in something new.” Hold on a moment? Isn’t there to be a series of brand-new Teletubbies episodes? Yes there is – but it is nothing to do with Wood. View oEmbed on the source website Wood no longer owns the rights to Teletubbies, which she co-created with Andrew Davenport, having sold them in 2013 to raise cash to continue making new programmes. “I was sad but I had to do it.” As a result, the new Tele- tubbies series, due to air on CBeebies later this year, “has nothing whatever to do with me.” She laughs, but I sense the sadness in her voice. Have you been shown any of the new shows, I ask. “No.” Will you watch them when they air? “No.” Really? “No. I couldn’t bring myself to. I mean I have nothing against them, it might be brilliant. They tell me they've got the best producer possible on it, so that's a good sign. But how could I watch it? All my programmes are like my children. It's like seeing a child remade in somebody else's image. So good luck to them. They bought it and I can't do anything about that." Are you sorry that the show is being remade? "In general, I’m just saying that there are such a lot of programmes being remade and I just feel the children’s television industry is worth more than that. It would be nice if more encouragement was given to new work, that’s all.” Wood’s reaction, though hardly a ringing endorsement of the new Teletubbies, is rather more charitable than that of Thunderbirds co-creator Gerry Anderson when his show was turned into a not-so-brilliant 2004 Hollywood movie. Anderson declared it “the biggest load of crap I have ever seen in my life”. But back to Twirlywoos. There is another way in which this show is different from Wood’s earlier creations (she is also responsible for Rosie & Jim and Brum). Twirlywoos, quite deliberately, wears its educational aspirations on its sleeve. An education consultant, Professor Cathy Nutbrown of Sheffield University, was on hand to advise Wood from the start. Unusually, each episode has a plain, rather utilitarian title, such as up, over or full – an unambiguous announcement of what each show is seeking to explain to its young viewers. “This is the first TV programme I’ve been involved with,” says Professor Nutbrown. “The thought and care that has gone into it is quite incredible. The educational element was built in from the beginning. It’s not an add-on. “We’ve shown it to children, and they don’t watch passively. They speak to the screen, do the actions. They do them spontaneously. "One of the central characteristics of the programme is movement. A programme might be based on 'up and down' or 'round and round'. This can eventually help children learn to write. They have to feel what it's like to go round and round before they can represent that in a mark on paper. And three basic marks – and and down, round and round, back and forth – are all children need to write most letters." View oEmbed on the source website Adult viewers who fondly remember the richly detailed worlds that Wood created for Tinky Winky and his pals, and ten years later produced for Igglepiggle and Upsy Daisy, may be surprised that a great deal of Twirlywoos occurs against a plain white background. Cost-cutting in an age of smaller TV budgets? No, insists Wood, “this was quite deliberate on my part. I didn’t want it to be cluttered. I wanted the movements to be very clear – you can ‘read’ them much more clearly against white. “Educational ideas were present in Teletubbies and In the Night Garden but much more subliminally,” adds Wood. “This show takes in the latest educational research and builds a comedy around it – whereas in the past I’ve just made a comedy and just by chance some of these ideas happened to be embedded within it.” With her 40 years of experience, Wood knows that not every one of her projects can go on to be sparkling, world-beating successes (Teletubbies has been translated into at least 45 languages). Does she know when she’s making a classic? “I wouldn’t say that. But you get a feeling in your bones about halfway through when you think: ‘This is going to work.’ ” And you’ve got a good feeling in your bones about this one? “Yes.” Twirlywoos is on CBeebies Monday-Friday at 9.25am and 1.25 pm
Is Babylon realistic? We call the police...
How does the Channel 4 comedy drama measure up to real life policing?
At the end of the first episode of Channel 4 police drama Babylon, James Nesbitt – playing Richard Miller, a dour Metropolitan Police Commissioner – complains that no matter how well the police do, the rest of us only ever notice the mistakes that they make. There’s no glory in getting things right 98 per cent of the time. “Do you know what 98 per cent right is?” Miller grumbles. “A big f***ing story on the two per cent.” Babylon is a slightly surreal cop show that was created by Danny Boyle of Slumdog Millionaire fame for a one-off pilot in February this year, and now it’s returning as a six-part series. There’s plenty of action, but it’s played for humour as much as drama and the tone of the dialogue is similar to spoof documentaries like Twenty Twelve and W1A. Yet the show is also trying to make some serious points: wondering aloud whether the police are obsessed with their public image, and whether the top brass are in touch with life on the ground. But how accurate is this portrayal of British policing? Well, who better to ask than two coppers from the C4 documentary 24 Hours in Police Custody? If you’ve been watching that magnificent series – and you really ought to have been – you’ll recall Bedfordshire police officers Martin Hart and Chris Hutton from the first episode, which catalogued a fascinating investigation into an alleged murder conspiracy. So what do the two real-life detectives make of Jimmy Nesbitt and his team on Babylon? Well, Detective Constable Hart (the cheery former holiday rep) liked it rather more than Detective Sergeant Hutton (the more matter-of-fact, bespectacled one). But both noticed the two per cent rather more than the 98. In fact, their scorecard would be rather more damning than that. “They got certain nuances right,” declares DC Hart. “But the bits they got wrong, they got hugely wrong.” But first of all, the bits that Babylon got right. Early on, inmates at a prison go on the rampage, attacking people and property. You’d call it a riot. I’d call it a riot. But in Babylon, the bosses are extremely reluctant to use the word. Rather better to label it a “severe disturbance”. “That made me laugh,” says DS Hutton. “The reason for that is that if it’s officially a riot, all the costs to repair the damage come out of the public purse.” It’s for this reason that the protagonists in the riots that gripped towns and cities in 2011 were charged with offences such as violent disorder or burglary. “So that did make me chuckle. But I think only police officers would probably get the joke.” The other true-to-life aspect of the show: bad- taste banter on display among the cops. DC Hart says: “You saw it on 24 Hours in Police Custody too. When you encounter things that are absolutely horrendous, if you don’t have a sense of humour, you’d have a breakdown. People on the outside might say: ‘How could you say that?’ Well, I say: ‘How can we walk towards these things when you run from them?’ ” And from there on in Hart and Hutton can only find holes in Babylon. Early on, an armed officer shoots an unarmed man dead. In the show, he's back at work the next day (though not terribly competently). "Not a chance," says DC Hart."No way on this earth." "He'd be suspended, have his gun taken away, put into counselling. You'd be lucky if you were back on the streets within three months. And the worst part is then you’d be investigated by the Independent Police Complaints Commission. That’s the joy of being an armed officer.” Of course, this show – like every other cop show on earth – massively overstates the prevalence of violent crime: last year, in the whole of the UK, police fired their weapons just three times. And there were precisely zero fatalities. There are more faults. The Commander’s “bag man” is a wimp who’d never have been appointed to the job. Two police vans turn up to a prison riot that would have needed dozens more. And the cops wouldn’t then sit around chatting and eating chicken nuggets. And there’s no way that the police’s PR team would allow TV news channels to broadcast live briefings of the force’s efforts to quell the riots – how would it be in their interests for the rioters to know what was going to happen to them? DS Hutton says the show “makes us look like a lot of bumbling idiots – buffoons, really”. Then he says something surprising: his wife, who works in heart surgery, has in the past worked as an expert consultant on a well-known and much-loved medical drama. Sometimes the programme makers took her advice, often they ignored it. On one occasion, he says, they told her: “It looks good, we’re going to do it anyway.” “So I think often with these programmes, it doesn’t really matter how it compares to reality. They just want to make something that’s entertaining. Any copper who watches Babylon probably won’t like it. But other members of the public probably will.” Babylon begins on Channel 4 tonight (13th November) at 10.00pm
What was the inspiration for Grantchester's crime-fighting vicar?
Author James Runcie on his father Robert, the former Archbishop of Canterbury
James Runcie is the author of the Grantchester Mysteries, the books upon which the ITV detective series (on Mondays) are based. He is also the son of Robert Runcie, former Archbishop of Canterbury, who died in 2000. James says that crime-solving vicar Sidney Chambers (played by James Norton in the TV series) owes a lot to his late father: both clerics were shaped by the appalling scenes they witnessed in the Second World War. “Sidney fought in the Scots Guards, which is exactly what my dad did; he was there at the Normandy landings, just as Dad was; and he was one of the first people into Bergen-Belsen, like Dad.” Robert Runcie won the Military Cross for his bravery. How many clerics have deliberately killed another man, as the Archbishop did on the battlefield? “Well, yes. And of course he never talked about it. And that’s the same with Sidney.” James says that he wanted to explode myths about Anglican priests: “I wanted to get as far away as possible from Dick Emery and Derek Nimmo... the idea that vicars are soppy and never make any decisions.” Did Runcie senior, like Chambers, fall in love with a woman he couldn’t have? “I don’t entirely know the answer to that,” says James, “but women fell in love with my dad because they thought he was a caring, sensitive person. He did have his fair share of what’s rudely called ‘spinster adoration’. There’s no doubt about that. And my mother went mad about all of this.” Grantchester is on Mondays at 9.00pm on ITV
The Apprentice: Where are the old candidates now?
As Ten Years of The Apprentice looks back at the business reality series, we have a chat with some of the former boardroom stars
Saira Khan - Series one (runner-up) Owns a skincare company, Miamoo, and co-presents ITV's Martin Lewis Money Show “Before The Apprentice I was an account manager for McVitie’s, taking cases of Hobnobs and Rich Tea biscuits around cash and carries in east London. The series changed my life and launched me into a media career. “But people make assumptions — they think I’m loud, aggressive, a bit sweary. But you didn’t see my caring side on the show. In business, people want to meet you because you’ve been on TV. But also I know there are companies who’ll say: ‘Oh no, not that gobby one off the telly. Forget it.’ ” Michelle Dewberry - Series two (winner) Has a shopping website, DailyChic.co.uk and is a business consultant “Some people emerge from The Apprentice looking like absolute Muppets. Others leave with their business reputation intact. I think I did. But it matters what you do afterwards. I was offered an awful lot of money to appear in my knickers and bra in the lads’ mags. How much? I won’t say. But if I’d taken up those offers, I’d have an incredibly comfortable life. “I was flattered but I’m in business, and if I’m sitting opposite a senior businessman in a meeting, I don’t want him to have seen my breasts.” Tre Azam - Series three (came third) Runs a medical technology company. In 2008, he was sentenced to 80 hours' community service for falsely claiming housing benefit “Did I learn anything from Alan Sugar? No, I didn’t. When I drop my children at school, I drive past his house. I never say hello. Sugar and I never really got on. “During filming, we were told we’d be taken for dinner and get to sit with him. I thought this would be a great opportunity to ask him questions and learn from him. But he spent the entire time telling us how much money he’d made and how many planes he’s got. “The court case cost me everything I had: my livelihood, my savings. I didn’t earn anything for 23 months. But it turned out to be a blessing. I became depressed and qualified as a trauma therapist. It made me much less arrogant. And I got rid of my materialistic possessions — because I had to bloody sell everything to pay my bills.” Lee McQueen - Series four (winner) Owns a recruitment firm. On his first day at Alan Sugar's company, Lee had food poisoning and rang in sick “What was Sir Alan’s reaction when I called? He was fine about it. He just said: ‘Make sure you come back virus-free, so you don’t pass it on to anyone else.’ I worked for him for two and a half years. We built a successful digital media business together. I take massive pride in that. “There was a lot of talk in the media that the winner didn’t get a proper job with Sir Alan. That he sticks you in a broom cupboard. Absolute rubbish. I saw him every day for the first nine months when I was building that business. Kate Walsh - Series five (runner-up) Presented Channel 5's Live from Studio Five (2009-11) and is now an executive for an international jewellery company “The Apprentice did change my life — I’m still with Philip [fellow contestant Philip Taylor]. We met on the show and have been together five years. “I enjoyed the TV work but when it ended, I didn’t trawl around for anything else. Even when I was doing the Channel 5 show, I’d kept up my business consultancy on the side. Business is what I’m really interested in. I’ve just been appointed vice-president, retail, for the jewellery chain Pandora. It’s a Danish company and we’ve got 150 stores in the UK.” “Then I decided I wanted to do my own thing, so I set up Raw Talent Academy. I now employ 18 people and this year the company will generate just under £1.5 million.” Stella English - Series six (winner) Works as a freelance management consultant. Last year, she sued Lord Sugar for constructive dismissal, claiming her job was a "sham". She lost the case “Because I went to court with Alan Sugar, people expect me to say that I hate The Apprentice. But I don’t. Winning it was an amazing experience I’d never want to undo. I learnt a lot of things, some good, some bad. I’ve not made any secret of the fact that I didn’t enjoy working at Viglen [Sugar’s company]. “Obviously, I wasn’t happy when I lost the court case. It cost me a lot of money. But I’m very glad I did it. I spoke my mind, and I stand by what I said. We had a subsequent court case where Alan Sugar tried to countersue me [to recover £35,000-worth of legal costs]. He lost because the tribunal ruled that I didn’t do anything in malice and I believed entirely in what I was saying. “I’ve got no personal issues with Alan Sugar. I’ve never said I hate him. I’m disappointed about what happened, but I don’t bear any grudges. After the second case, I was flooded with job offers. I was stunned. Things have never been better.” Tom Pellereau - Series Seven (winner) The inventor's Stylfile nail care products are sold in Tesco, ASDA, Sainsbury's, Waitrose and Boots “The show changed my life. What is it people say on the show? I’m 110 per cent certain it has. I look back and think of ‘life before The Apprentice’ and ‘life after The Apprentice’. I was at a very low point when I applied to be on the show. I’d spent ten years trying to make it as an inventor — and it had been a terrible week: I’d lost my job and split up with my girlfriend. It was one last roll of the dice. “Three years later, I have my own company that has made a total turnover of £1.5 million, I’m married, I have a baby and my wife is pregnant with another on the way in January. It’s a fairy tale come true. Lord Sugar and I own 50 per cent each of the company. I see him regularly — just this morning in fact, because my team is based in his office. To me, he’s a bit of a genius. “But he can still be pretty hard on me. The other day I presented what I thought was a brilliant idea to him in a board meeting — and he thought I was joking. He said: ’Are you mad? This is utter rubbish!’" Tom Gearing - Series eight (runner-up) CEO of Cult Wines, a company he set up while still at university “What did I learn personally from Lord Sugar? The way The Apprentice is filmed, you don’t get a lot of exposure to him. You only see him when you’re in the boardroom. So it’s difficult to say. For me it was more about the experience of working under pressure, with different people.” Adam Corbally - Series 8 candidate and voted RadioTimes.com's readers' favourite candidate of all time Continues to invest in property, is a motivational speaker and has just launched his own concierge company. "I learnt a lot, made a lot of friends, made some money can’t buy experiences. And I’m very, very grateful and thankful. I’ve got massive, massive respect for Nick, Karren and Lord Sugar and everybody should have, because they’re all very credible individuals. "It’s the only show even before I was on it I watched every week. I used to pause it, that’s how much of a fan I was, and sit and tell whoever I was sat with where they were going wrong and what they should be doing. It used to take me two hours to watch a one-hour show because I was so opinionated and I thought I could win it. Then it was like ‘Go on then, put your money where your mouth is’. I didn’t win it, but at least I had a go." Leah Totton - Series nine (winner) Set up a cosmetic clinic in the City of London “Lord Sugar owns 50 per cent of the business but has no day-to-day role. As a mentor, he’s incredibly valuable. He’s always there if I pick up the phone and sometimes pops into the clinic to see how things are going. But he’s not always on your back – he leaves me to it. He’s more of a troubleshooter. “Has he had any Botox treatments? I’ve repeatedly offered them, but he won’t. There’s still time...” Ten Years of The Apprentice is on BBC1 tonight at 10.35pm
How people of Hungerford feel about new drama Southcliffe
Drama depicts a local lad’s killing spree – but how do the residents of Hungerford feel about it? Vincent Graff reports…
There’s a scene missing from Channel 4’s disturbing new four-part series Southcliffe. Heralded as “one of the bravest and most important dramas in the channel’s history”, the drama tells the story of an “ordinary” morning in a quiet market town, which is suddenly ripped apart when a gun-obsessed loner goes on a shooting spree. Within a few hours, 15 people lie dead. None of them has done anything wrong – except the obvious: wrong place, wrong time. You read all that and immediately you think you know the opening few moments, don’t you? Scruffy Rambo-style murderer straps on a firearm, barges his way down the high street, shooting everything and everyone in sight, blood everywhere. Except Southcliffe is nothing like that. Despite the subject matter, there’s remarkably little on-screen violence, and not a great deal of blood. This is a nuanced, intelligent look at how people react to grief, how they deal with loss, how they recover from horrendous trauma. Writer Tony Grisoni says the only reason the drama features a “spree killing” at all is that he needed a device that would leave many members of a close-knit community suffering a bereavement at the same time (he’d considered making the drama about an industrial accident or a natural disaster). That said, the events in the fictional town of Southcliffe bear a striking resemblance to the Hungerford massacre. Even if you don’t remember the details, you’ll doubtless recall the incident. On the afternoon of 19 August 1987, local man Michael Ryan went on the rampage in the small Berkshire town, shooting 31 people – 16 of them fatally – before turning the gun on himself. The similarities are striking: the Southcliffe killer, Stephen Morton, like Ryan, is a resident of the town he terrorises. He’s a fantasist, obsessed with guns and the military. Like Ryan, he’s mocked and teased by local people and lives with his mother. (There are echoes, too, in Morton’s crimes of the 2010 massacre in Cumbria and the 1996 killings in Dunblane.) Grisoni stresses that Southcliffe – which was filmed in Faversham, Kent – is not based on the Hungerford killings, though he did visit the Berkshire town as part of his research because “if you’re going to include a shooting spree in a small market town, I thought it was the right thing to do”. But, he adds emphatically, “I wasn’t looking to make a documentary.” But the drama raises an interesting question: how does a small town recover after a mass shooting? Ron Tarry, now 87, was mayor of Hungerford at the time of the tragedy. He was out of harm’s way on the day – a sales representative in the agricultural industry, he was visiting a nearby farm and rushed home when he heard the news – but he knew many of the victims, and was at the forefront of efforts to put the town back together. He says, “I think we have recovered, largely because of the community spirit here. “One of the things that helped us recover was the realisation that this was our problem – it was one of our townspeople who did it, not a stranger passing through town. And to some extent that made us feel we’d better do something about it. “There was an immediate community reaction. People said, ‘What can we do to help?’” An office was set up to deal with the immediate aftermath, staffed by local volunteers. “The first thing I had to do was deal with the money that started to turn up. I remember on the Saturday of that week [three days after the killings] a whole mailbag of cheques arrived and my wife said, ‘What are we going to do?’ So we set up the Hungerford Tragedy Fund. We appointed three trustees and we gave them absolute authority to distribute the money as they thought. And there was more than £1 million. Even today I’ve no idea who got the money and I’m glad I don’t know.” There was a memorial service a few weeks later. Interestingly, all the names of the dead were read out – with the exception of the killer’s. And there was another difficult issue for the town to deal with: how, if at all, should it officially remember the event? Should the council erect a memorial in the victims’ names on the high street? In the end, Hungerford chose not a grand monument but a simple plaque listing the names of the victims on the brick gatepost of the playing fields on the outskirts of town. Tarry says, “The memorial is fairly modest. People from the press and television who have come to see me, say, ‘That’s rather underwhelming, isn’t it?’ And perhaps it is. But that’s what it is. We thought it was right and I still think it’s right. It caused controversy – some of the families thought we were hiding it away and we were ashamed of it. But the feeling was that we didn’t want a big granite statue in the middle of town that would become the focus of attention.” Tarry adds, “These days, people talk about the tragedy only very rarely. There are special prayers on the anniversary of the shootings, but generally it’s not mentioned. Nearer the time, people would clam up if anyone tried to talk about those events – it was something we should try to forget. “And even now, people say to me, ‘Don’t bother [talking to journalists]. Say you have nothing to say.’ But I feel I ought to speak up. I think it’s my duty to help people remember how it happened.” Even today, there’s a split in the town about whether the best way to live with the past is to open up or keep quiet. I call Bryan Geater, whose daughter Myra was shot by Ryan (she was seriously injured by survived). The first thing he says is, “We don’t talk about that now.” But then his attitude softens slightly. “The town itself has healed quite well,” he says. “It’s now 26 years. People came together.” He’d rather that no mention of the tragedy was ever made, “but the problem is that it’s still on the internet, isn’t it? People look up Hungerford and it’s there stabbing and staring them in the face.” The violent imagery he uses is striking. How does Geater feel about Channel 4 making a drama about a killing spree in a small town? He’d prefer that they didn’t but doesn’t appear to feel strongly about it: “I don’t agree with it, but it’s always going to happen.” Towards the end of our (short) conversation, he even admits that he might watch Southcliffe. Tarry says it’s tough for the townspeople that, all these years later, the word Hungerford automatically means massacre to the vast major- ity of people in Britain. Yet doesn’t he involuntarily engage in the same word association when he hears anything about the town of Dunblane? “Yes, I probably do.” Incidentally, Tarry says he was moved by the sight of Wimbledon champion Andy Murray – a pupil at Dunblane primary school at the time of the massacre – breaking down on camera when presenter Sue Barker asked him about it. “It did rather shake me for a moment. It obviously affected him seriously,” says Tarry. “It still hurts that when you say Hungerford, people say, ‘Ah yes, we know about Michael Ryan – we know about all that,’” says Tarry. “In fact, for a while afterwards, when people asked me where I was from, I would say that I came from the Newbury area. “But Hungerford is a small country town, not the sort of place you’d think something like that might happen. That was one terrible day in thou- sands of years of history. It’s not what Hungerford is like at all.” See Southcliffe Sunday and Monday 9:00pm, C4
Victoria Wood on the great Mozart heist that inspired Loving Miss Hatto
The award-winning comedienne explains how a suburban couple hoodwinked the world of classical music
Victoria Wood recalls the moment five years ago when she heard the first rumblings of the scandal that was to inspire her latest TV project. “I was in my bedroom, making my bed on a Saturday morning, listening to Radio 3,” she recalls. As she puffed up the pillows, the voices on her radio grew increasingly indignant about what had happened. It was a disgrace. Shocking. Quite the most outrageous scandal. Or something like that. As Wood explains with a shrug and a smile, “It passed me by, really… I didn’t go: ‘Oh my God, I must write about this.’” Yet that is precisely what Wood has been doing over the past three years – writing a script that tells the true story of a wonderfully gentle middle-class caper that left the world of classical music in uproar – and music critics with faces as red as a trumpeter straining for a high note. Loving Miss Hatto is the tale of Joyce Hatto (played by Francesca Annis), an English classical pianist who died in 2006, aged 77. Hatto’s death was marked by glowing obituaries in several national newspapers. The Telegraph praised her “deeply expressive and profoundly moving interpretations” of Liszt and Chopin, while The Guardian declared her “one of the greatest pianists that Britain has ever produced”. But they also pointed out the extraordinary trajectory of her career: she enjoyed only lukewarm success early on, but received glittering accolades in her later years when she turned to the recording studio, her stage career having been cut short by cancer. The only problem was that there was a gaping hole at the centre of the story of the sick pensioner who turned in brilliant performances in the studio at her modest Hertfordshire home. Soon after her death, it emerged that many – perhaps most – solo Joyce Hatto CDs didn’t feature the exclusive work of Joyce Hatto. Instead, the performances of other pianists, whose work had been copied and “pasted in” by her husband, William Barrington-Coupe (played by Alfred Molina), who owned the record label that distributed her work. It’s possible some “Hatto” recordings contain no authentic Joyce Hatto at all. The BPI (British Phonographic Industry ) called it the most extraordinary case of music piracy it has seen – and still no one knows how much of the work that was said to have been recorded by Joyce was faked, or whether she was party to the deception. “It’s a very white-collar crime to rip off Mozart, isn’t it? I mean, it’s very…” Wood smiles and pauses, endowing the next word with as much affection as she can muster, “English”. We’re talking in a cold, upstairs room in Dublin’s Olympia Theatre. Downstairs, the actors and crew are on the theatre’s stage, recreating the moment when Joyce and Barrington-Coupe first met, in 1953 at London’s Wigmore Hall. Wood is being careful about what she says. Barrington-Coupe – known as “Barry” – is still alive and so, theoretically, could sue for defamation if he feels Wood has unfairly blackened his character (though, it should be noted, his character was not blemishless before all this – he went to prison for tax fraud some years ago). “Barrington-Coupe admitted he had made tiny edits in Joyce’s recordings because she was too ill to play without making what he called ‘cries of pain’ due to her cancer,” says Wood. “He said he had taken just a few bars from other people’s recordings, patched up her performance and that she knew nothing about it. "But if you go by the waveforms of the CDs, there appear to be whole movements that are identical to other recordings, so that doesn’t bear out his account of just taking the odd notes here and there.” So did Joyce know what was being done in her name? “I don’t see how she could not have known,” says Wood. Meanwhile, no one has ever been able to track down the National Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra that featured on several Hatto concertos. “That name is just lots of words that sound like orchestras, isn’t it?” smiles Wood. Nor has the NPSO’s elusive conductor, René Köhler, ever poked his head up to say how much he enjoyed working with Hatto. Did Wood go to meet “Barry”, who still lives in the house where he did all his digital manipulation? “No, I didn’t want to meet him. It would have cramped my style.” Her film is not a documentary; it is, she says, “above all, a love story”. This is about a couple starting off with very high hopes and they get bashed about by life,” continues Wood. “My reading of their story is that Joyce hadn’t been treated well in the early years – a professor at the Royal Academy of Music apparently told her that, as a woman, she’d be better off making roast dinners – and they were disappointed how things had turned out. Either it was good fun to create this career for her, or they felt that she was owed some sort of legacy.” Surprisingly, “Barry” does not appear to have become wealthy off the back of his dishonesty – and the record companies are not bothering to chase any financial damages from him. The real victims, perhaps, are the music critics. In 1992, writer Bryce Morrison slated a performance of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 3 by Yefim Bronfman as “devoid of glamour… He lacks crispness and definition.” Yet, 14 years later, when that same recording was being passed off as one of Joyce Hatto’s works, he wrote: “Stunning… among the finest on record.” “People invested their emotions in Joyce’s story, and when they listened to the music they were telling themselves a story,” says Wood. “And that’s why people are cross – because they fell for it.” Wood refuses to be too harsh on Joyce and Barrington-Coupe. “I’m not sitting in judgement on them, though I don’t condone what they did. We all do things that we shouldn’t and we’ve all got our justifications for them." Loving Miss Hatto is on BBC1 tonight at 8:30pm