Radio Times
type: channel
link: https://www.radiotimes.com
date: 2022-07-07T14:24:43.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Kris Marshall says goodbye to Death in Paradise – and explains why he had to leave
items: Everything you need to know about Sky's new historical drama Jamestown
items: Julie Bushby has a very different theory for why Karen Matthews lied about daughter Shannon's disappearance
items: Martin Shaw on why now is the right time to end Inspector George Gently
items: Richard Osman: it's time we made bright kids the heroes
items: 24 Hours in Police Custody: behind the scenes of the fly-on-the-wall documentary
items: Robert Winston talks what Child of Our Time got wrong: ‘I was never happy presenting this as nature v nurture’
items: "It was my duty to get the names out": the brutal stories of Assad's victims told in C4's Syria’s Disappeared
items: “It’s a confederacy of amateurs” – John Bird opens up the House of Lords in BBC documentary
items: Who shall we save today? BBC2's Hospital reveals an NHS in crisis
items: Eric Idle on Terry Jones, Brian Cox, religion and The Entire Universe
items: Could this be the next essential piece of kit for Parkinson’s sufferers?
items: "I'm really quite clever" - Giles Coren on competing with his sister and his new quiz show
items: Andrew Neil on Brexit, Trump... and why he’s worth more than the PM
items: Clash of Loyalties: Saddam Hussein's answer to Lawrence of Arabia
items: What happened to Carole Packman?
items: David Harewood: I had a shocker on the set of The Night Manager
items: Where are the Dragons' Den success stories now?
items: Bill Turnbull: 'I don't know why people want to make you feel so awkward about having belief'
items: Olivia Colman: Pregnancy didn't slow me down on The Night Manager
items: David Attenborough presents the biggest dinosaur ever
items: The true story behind Jericho
items: 15 facts you might not know about the Teletubbies
items: Teletubbies creator Anne Wood introduces CBeebies' new stars: the Twirlywoos
items: Is Babylon realistic? We call the police...
items: What was the inspiration for Grantchester's crime-fighting vicar?
items: The Apprentice: Where are the old candidates now?
items: How people of Hungerford feel about new drama Southcliffe
items: Victoria Wood on the great Mozart heist that inspired Loving Miss Hatto

Kris Marshall says goodbye to Death in Paradise – and explains why he had to leave
type: item
date: 2019-04-04T23:44:00.000Z
creator: Vincent Graff
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The winds of change are blowing through Saint Marie. Here, Kris Marshall talks through his journey with the show
encoded: 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 …

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Everything you need to know about Sky's new historical drama Jamestown
type: item
date: 2019-03-08T11:07:00.000Z
creator: Vincent Graff
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The true tale of how middle-class brides-for-sale were shipped to America, as shown in the new drama starring Sophie Rundle
encoded: 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 nati…

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Julie Bushby has a very different theory for why Karen Matthews lied about daughter Shannon's disappearance
type: item
date: 2018-04-18T09:18:00.000Z
creator: Vincent Graff
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: 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"
encoded: 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 s…

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Martin Shaw on why now is the right time to end Inspector George Gently
type: item
date: 2018-01-26T10:34:00.000Z
creator: Vincent Graff
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: 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
encoded: 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 rel…

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Richard Osman: it's time we made bright kids the heroes
type: item
date: 2017-08-14T08:00:00.000Z
creator: Vincent Graff
subject: Documentaries
subject: Entertainment
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The host of Child Genius discusses the importance of losing, his own upbringing and why it's OK for children to compete on TV
encoded: 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 Sho…

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24 Hours in Police Custody: behind the scenes of the fly-on-the-wall documentary
type: item
date: 2017-06-19T10:09:00.000Z
creator: Vincent Graff
subject: Documentaries
subject: News
subject: TV
description: Life in Luton police station is more gripping than any drama. But why do the suspects agree to appear on camera?
encoded: 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 i…

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Robert Winston talks what Child of Our Time got wrong: ‘I was never happy presenting this as nature v nurture’
type: item
date: 2017-04-03T14:52:00.000Z
creator: Vincent Graff
subject: Documentaries
subject: News
subject: TV
description: Lord Winston also talks being bullied at school and the new challenges faces kids of today
encoded: 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 …

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"It was my duty to get the names out": the brutal stories of Assad's victims told in C4's Syria’s Disappeared
type: item
date: 2017-03-23T07:17:00.000Z
creator: Vincent Graff
subject: Documentaries
subject: News
subject: TV
description: 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
encoded: 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 r…

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“It’s a confederacy of amateurs” – John Bird opens up the House of Lords in BBC documentary
type: item
date: 2017-02-27T11:18:00.000Z
creator: Vincent Graff
subject: Documentaries
subject: News
subject: TV
description: John Bird used to wash dishes in the House of Lords – now he’s back to clean up after our MPs
encoded: 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 pove…

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Who shall we save today? BBC2's Hospital reveals an NHS in crisis
type: item
date: 2017-01-12T07:10:00.000Z
creator: Vincent Graff
subject: Documentaries
subject: News
subject: TV
description: Meet the healthcare decision-makers that face daily life and death dilmemmas
encoded: 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 focu…

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Eric Idle on Terry Jones, Brian Cox, religion and The Entire Universe
type: item
date: 2016-12-26T09:00:00.000Z
creator: Vincent Graff
subject: Comedy
subject: News
subject: TV
description: 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?
encoded: 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 …

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Could this be the next essential piece of kit for Parkinson’s sufferers?
type: item
date: 2016-12-07T09:00:00.000Z
creator: Vincent Graff
subject: Documentaries
subject: News
subject: TV
description: A game-changing gadget is designed for Emma Lawton on The Big Life Fix with Simon Reeve
encoded: “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 devi…

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"I'm really quite clever" - Giles Coren on competing with his sister and his new quiz show
type: item
date: 2016-08-22T10:00:00.000Z
creator: Vincent Graff
subject: Entertainment
subject: News
subject: TV
description: 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?
encoded: 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, pr…

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Andrew Neil on Brexit, Trump... and why he’s worth more than the PM
type: item
date: 2016-08-16T12:50:00.000Z
creator: Vincent Graff
subject: Current Affairs
subject: News
subject: TV
description: “I do almost 180 programmes a year – more than almost anybody else in the political sphere”
encoded: 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? T…

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Clash of Loyalties: Saddam Hussein's answer to Lawrence of Arabia
type: item
date: 2016-07-24T11:30:00.000Z
creator: Vincent Graff
subject: Documentaries
subject: News
subject: TV
description: Soon after he took power, the Iraqi dictator decided to make an epic movie about the birth of the nation. What happened to it?
encoded: 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 wo…

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What happened to Carole Packman?
type: item
date: 2016-07-14T11:00:00.000Z
creator: Vincent Graff
subject: Documentaries
subject: News
subject: True Crime
subject: TV
description: 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
encoded: 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 …

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David Harewood: I had a shocker on the set of The Night Manager
type: item
date: 2016-03-21T15:39:00.000Z
creator: Vincent Graff
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: 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
encoded: “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 …

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Where are the Dragons' Den success stories now?
type: item
date: 2016-02-28T11:00:00.000Z
creator: Vincent Graff
subject: Entertainment
subject: News
subject: TV
description: Richard Osman on what happened to some of the Den's most notable alumni after the cameras stopped rolling
encoded: “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…

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Bill Turnbull: 'I don't know why people want to make you feel so awkward about having belief'
type: item
date: 2016-02-26T07:45:00.000Z
creator: Vincent Graff
subject: Entertainment
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The early-morning chat show talks about his Christian faith, life after BBC Breakfast – and bees
encoded: 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 3.3…

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Olivia Colman: Pregnancy didn't slow me down on The Night Manager
type: item
date: 2016-02-16T08:30:00.000Z
creator: Vincent Graff
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: 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...
encoded: 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 b…

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David Attenborough presents the biggest dinosaur ever
type: item
date: 2016-01-24T09:25:00.000Z
creator: Vincent Graff
subject: Documentaries
subject: News
subject: TV
description: If you thought the diplodocus was big, meet a truly ginormous new dinosaur
encoded: 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 c…

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The true story behind Jericho
type: item
date: 2016-01-14T13:00:00.000Z
creator: Vincent Graff
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The real-life construction of the railways inspired the new ITV drama
encoded: 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…

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15 facts you might not know about the Teletubbies
type: item
date: 2015-11-17T05:30:00.000Z
creator: Vincent Graff
subject: Entertainment
subject: News
subject: TV
description: From the show's original name to Tinky Winky getting sacked, here are some secrets from behind the scenes...
encoded: 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 Teletubbie…

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Teletubbies creator Anne Wood introduces CBeebies' new stars: the Twirlywoos
type: item
date: 2015-02-23T14:20:00.000Z
creator: Vincent Graff
subject: News
subject: TV
description: Meet Great BigHoo, Toodloo, Chickedy and Chick - but why won't Wood be watching the Teletubbies remake?
encoded: 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 …

Is Babylon realistic? We call the police...
type: item
date: 2014-11-13T17:18:00.000Z
creator: Vincent Graff
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
subject: Channel 4
description: How does the Channel 4 comedy drama measure up to real life policing?
encoded: 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…

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What was the inspiration for Grantchester's crime-fighting vicar?
type: item
date: 2014-10-20T12:00:00.000Z
creator: Vincent Graff
subject: Books
subject: Going Out
subject: News
subject: TV
description: Author James Runcie on his father Robert, the former Archbishop of Canterbury
encoded: 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?
type: item
date: 2014-10-13T13:10:00.000Z
creator: Vincent Graff
subject: Entertainment
subject: News
subject: Reality TV
subject: TV
description: As Ten Years of The Apprentice looks back at the business reality series, we have a chat with some of the former boardroom stars
encoded: 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 qualifi…

How people of Hungerford feel about new drama Southcliffe
type: item
date: 2013-08-03T22:01:00.000Z
creator: Vincent Graff
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: Drama depicts a local lad’s killing spree – but how do the residents of Hungerford feel about it? Vincent Graff reports…
encoded: 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 Dun…

Victoria Wood on the great Mozart heist that inspired Loving Miss Hatto
type: item
date: 2012-12-23T07:16:00.000Z
creator: Vincent Graff
subject: Comedy
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The award-winning comedienne explains how a suburban couple hoodwinked the world of classical music
encoded: 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…