History is silent on a decadent era when guns and gangs held sway. Zoe Williams reveals the extraordinary story of Birmingham’s very own Sopranos.
They're finally back on our screens. BBC drama Peaky Blinders has returned for its sixth and final season, which inevitably opened with emotions running high and threats of conflict amongst its principal characters. The drama follows Cillian Murphy's charismatic Brummie gangster Tommy Shelby, and his turbulent rise to power. It features the return of Anya Taylor-Joy as Gina Gray, Aimee-Ffion Edwards as Tommy's sister Esme, and Tom Hardy as the infamous Alfie Solomons. Many fans had thought Alfie had been killed back in season 4 after being shot in the face by Tommy, but the show's creator Steven Knight recently revealed that Hardy insisted on the character's comeback. "The plan [for Solomon to return] changed, let me put it that way – because Tom does love this character," Knight told Metro.co.uk. Meanwhile, Knight has also said that viewers should expect "chaos" from Alfie's return in an interview with RadioTimes.com. "I think it's difficult to explain without giving stuff away, but we might find Alfie in a position not quite as strong as he normally is. And the question is, can he build himself back up?" he revealed. Stephen Graham is yet to unveil his anticipated gangster character Hayden Stagg, who has so far been shrouded in secrecy. We were treated to our first look at Graham's Stagg this week to whet our appetite, and it looks as though he's going head-to-head (almost literally) with Paul Anderson's Arthur Shelby, who doesn’t look best pleased by the new gangster’s presence. With many historical figures also set to appear in season 6, it's left fans to wonder whether the Peaky Blinders were real-life people once upon a time. Read on to find out how historically accurate the figures are that we see on screen… Who were the real Peaky Blinders? The BBC's Peaky Blinders opens on a slum street of Birmingham. The year is 1919. There are horses and Chinese fortune tellers, barely dressed urchins and men in suits so sharp they could take your eye out. The atmosphere is febrile, smoky and crackling with nerves. It’s the most distinctive-looking British drama you could conceive of, peering into an era that, until now, had slipped off history’s radar, considered neither as muddy and tragic as the First World War nor as heroic and epic as the Second. Or perhaps history forgot these years on purpose. The writer is Steven Knight – best known for Stephen Frears’s 2002 film Dirty Pretty Things. “From about 1918 until 1928 in England, it was just madness. Pure hedonism,” he says. “There was a lot of cocaine, a lot of opium, a lot of dancing, a lot of nightlife.” All of which sounds like a laugh riot, but of course it had its dark side; indeed, there was hardly any silver lining. And that’s where the Peaky Blinders come in, so called for the razor blades they kept in the brims of their sinister-looking caps and hats. They were the Shelby family, the Sopranos of the post-First World War era, with a few key differences – the society the Shelbys lived in had been racked by the war, leaving profoundly damaged men strewn across every class and community; revolution was in the air, and the Government was terrified of it; and the Peaky Blinders aren’t remotely fictional. Knight explains: “The reason it came to me was that my parents grew up in Birmingham in the 20s. My mum, when she was nine years old, was a bookie’s runner; they used to use kids to take bets because it was all illegal. My dad’s uncle was part of the Peaky Blinders. It was reluctantly delivered, but my family did give me little snapshots, of gypsies and horses and gang fights and guns, and immaculate suits. 'One of the first stories that inspired me was of my dad when he was a little kid, sent to deliver a message. There was a table, covered in money and guns, surrounded by blokes, beautifully dressed, drinking beer from jam jars. You didn’t buy glasses. You only spent money on clothes.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2022/02/24307772-high_res-peaky-blinders-vi-9c08ea3.jpg" width="4285" height="2857" alt="WARNING: Embargoed for publication until 00:00:01 on 08/03/2022 - Programme Name: Peaky Blinders VI - TX: n/a - Episode: Ep 3 (No. 3) - Picture Shows: Tommy Shelby (CILLIAN MURPHY) - (C) Caryn Mandabach Productions Ltd. - Photographer: Robert Viglasky" title="Ep 3" /> This atmosphere is captured wonderfully in Peaky Blinders. The gang’s control in Birmingham has a Wild West quality, where the violence is instrumental and strategic, never savage or incidental, and the rules of society are being broken and remade in front of you. But their lives are burdened by far more than the pressures of self-interest. The casualties of the First World War are everywhere: men who had survived the bullets, but would go to their graves before post-traumatic stress was recognised. The authorities were no good to these shell-shocked men: if anyone was going to watch over them, it would have been men like the Peaky Blinders. The war and its aftermath are dealt with in an original and oblique way, as a hangover that nobody would acknowledge, but everybody had. Knight says that a load of clichés dominate how this interwar period is played out in drama: “We tiptoe towards things because we’re afraid of being seen to be glamorising or mythologising anything. If it’s post-First World War, it’s all officers shooting themselves. Or it’s flappers, being done in the way flappers have always been done. But why would they behave like that? It was only a couple of years before then that you couldn’t show an ankle, and suddenly they were in really short skirts. Why? Because they didn’t give a damn.” As grim as the period must have been, from the distance of decades this is a transfixing time, decadent and bacchanalian, traumatised and anti-authoritarian, deeply political, desperate for things to be different, but petrified of change. “I think there was a loss of faith in technology: before the war, there was this belief that every new discovery meant more progress. Then nations just took all they’d learnt and used it to destroy each other,” says Knight. “The idea of the King’s authority became a joke, for a while, because people in power had been sending 60,000 men to their deaths every morning and the blokes knew it was pointless. They’d get the order [to go over the top], and think, ‘No, you’ve made a mistake, there are machine guns, and we’re going to get killed.’” View oEmbed on the source website Alongside that anarchic hatred of authority there was a real hunger for change, a genuine Communist movement, and the authorities were terrified. One always forgets that this could ever have been a feature of the landscape, here – that a government could ever believe in the people being revolutionary, or that anybody could ever have that appetite for upheaval. But the threat was both real and perceived. A policeman’s strike in 1919 lent ballast to the idea that the old world order had no defenders left. I always think of the persecution of Communists as an American disease, a short-lived, collective madness. But it’s wrong to think Britain didn’t suffer this paranoia. “Men were arrested for sedition and sentenced to six years for speaking in public about Communism,” says Knight. “They were taken away and beaten up. I remember my dad saying a bloke would stand up and talk about the Russian Revolution and they’d grab him, put him in a van and you wouldn’t see him again. You think, that’s not what it says in the books. But when you do research, get papers from the period, you realise this is what happened. It’s a secret history.” Predictably, with a paranoid government and the impossibility of telling a revolutionary from a malcontent, life became very restrictive, close to a police state. Knight’s vivid memory is of his grandfather. “He was wounded in the Somme, so he had a bullet in his shoulder his whole life. I remember my dad telling me that in 1926 he opened his door and there were British soldiers stationed there, pointing machine guns at his front door. And he’d just given everything to his country. These were people just like us, you know. They were no different to us, inside.” Part of the drama’s magnetism lies in its dialogue: precisely observed, but very informal, which underlines how little people have changed. “What amuses me, and horrifies me, in English period drama is that people always write in a certain way: will not, can not, do not. Everybody speaks in this very formal, written- down way and it affects how characters are. This is a period drama where people speak normally. You go into the past, but you let people speak. And if you break that door down, you realise that people are just like us.” I’ll resist describing the plot, partly for fear of spoilers, but also because, like all the best dramas, when you list the events, it does nothing like justice to the world they create. There’s a huge amount going on, and the circumstances are extreme – men driven mad, men driven into the arms of opium, alcohol, politics, thuggery, anywhere but back to pre-war normality. That was nothing, compared with the women. In the first five series, femininity is expressed by Aunt Polly, matriarch of the Shelby family and magisterially played by Helen McCrory. She’s the power and the brains of the generation. You’d watch it just for her and to listen to her smoky Birmingham accent, like a sinister lullaby. “Cocaine became a huge thing, for women. They just wanted to escape. And I guess that’s what stopped it becoming a revolution,” says Knight. “It was totally self-destructive and very sexual. If you read the Daily Mail from those days, the big scandal was about nightclubs, everybody having cocaine from these blue bottles. Everybody was having sex with everybody else, there were threesomes, orgies... People thought England was going to hell. Then it stopped, in about 1928. I suppose people recovered.” During this hiatus of propriety, of rules, lives were ruined. “A policeman’s main job, one of the tasks that took up his day, was collecting babies as he went on his foot patrol, babies that had been born and abandoned.” But fortunes were made as well, and we meet the Peaky Blinkers on the up, able to take on everything, from the most vicious police brutality to the rival gangs and the Black and Tans. Only a state of semi-anarchy could suit this family; and only this family’s scramble for supremacy, brought so brilliantly alive, could animate this anarchic era that we’ve almost forgotten. Who are the real historical figures in Peaky Blinders season 6? The new season sees a number of real historical figures being explored, which include Sir Oswald Mosley and his future wife Lady Diana Mitford. Played by Sam Claflin, Sir Oswald Mosley was a British politician who rose to prominence in the 1920s as an MP. In the 1930s he founded and led the British Union of Fascists. Diana Mitford, played by Amber Anderson, was Sir Oswald Mosley's wife and fellow fascist, being a staunch supporter of his political ideology. Elsewhere, Jack Nelson, played by James Frecheville, is partially inspired by American businessman, investor and politician Joseph Patrick Kennedy. He was the patriarch of the Kennedy family, which included President JFK. In the drama, Jack Nelson is the powerful uncle of Gina Gray (Taylor-Joy) and is the boss of her husband Michael Gray in the United States. Finally, a recurring character in the series and on-off ally to Shelby is the iconic British politician Sir Winston Churchill, played in the most recent seasons by Neil Maskell. The Real Peaky Blinders is available to stream on BBC iPlayer. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide to see what's on tonight. The latest issue of Radio Times is on sale now – subscribe now to get each issue delivered to your door. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to the Radio Times podcast with Jane Garvey.
In Plain Sight's Martin Compston on becoming serial killer Peter Manuel: “It’s the darkest thing that I’ll ever play"
The star of ITV's new serial killer drama also talks working with Ken Loach and returning to Line of Duty
Interview originally published 21st December, 2016. You never expect a sunny nature from an actor who’s made his name as a policeman. It’s ridiculous, but it’s true: Martin Compston’s superb performance as the often isolated, frequently luckless, mostly good-guy Steve Arnott, in Jed Mercurio’s Line of Duty, primes you to expect, at the very least, a serious, laconic guy in a sharp suit and a moral quandary. Martin Compston as DS Steve Arnott in Line of Duty Instead, he has quite a playful, expansive manner, although he’s thoughtful with it. He has an athletic energy; standing on Dean Street in London’s Soho, he looks like a young, Brando-era boxer, who doesn’t much like the violence but enjoys jumping around and wearing shiny shorts. I discover this is partly true because he started his career as a professional footballer. To have had two dream careers before you hit 30 (he’s now 32) might cause a lesser person to be boastful, but he’s adamantly not. “I was playing Scottish first division,” he explains. “That’s a bit different. I was lucky enough to have a glimpse of a dream for a year, so it was a big decision at the time – am I going to choose football or acting? But it wasn’t a choice between Manchester United and SpiderMan. It was a choice between one more year at Morton or being an unemployed actor.” Line of Duty was the show that made him a face. “The scripts have always been phenomenal, and we started with a pretty solid cast, and were spoiled with all the people we’ve had as guest stars. “But I didn’t expect it to be such a big hit with audiences, because we don’t make anything easy for them. And we always have these cliffhangers that leave people waiting, and that’s been dying out. With the box set, binge culture, everything’s so immediate.” He lets that hang in the air for a quarter second then worries that maybe it sounds a bit po-faced. “I’m guilty of it as well! It’s great, watching Netflix with a hangover. You can waste a day. But there is something to be said for community watching, going in to work the next day and talking about programmes you’re all watching together.” He’s careful not to sound grand. “You’ve got to be aware of your limitations,” he says. “I’m 32 now. If I’d stayed in football, I’d be at the end of my career.” He talks about his job as though it could be an in office but just happens to be a set; he loves the process not the trappings. “Sure, you meet some amazing people, but I’ve got a lot of good people in my life. I genuinely love being on set. Apart from being with my wife or watching Celtic, that’s probably when I’m happiest.” His career started in an unusual way – no childhood dreams segueing into drama school and on to TV via Casualty. At 17, he was discovered from school by the director Ken Loach, who in 2000 cast him as Liam in Sweet Sixteen, a beautiful film about errant, anguished youth in Scotland. (It came out in 2002.) He only went up for the part because he’d caught an earlier Loach movie by mistake: “Me and my friend took these two girls on a date. I can’t remember what we were meant to see, but it wasn’t on and we saw My Name Is Joe instead. Suddenly I saw characters I recognised, that spoke like me, and I thought, ‘I could be these people.’ That film ended in a big fight, with a bat. Me and my friend were running away to tell our other friends about it.” It was a priceless apprenticeship, learning to act from Ken Loach. “You’re never really aware of cameras. It’s simple things – Ken never says ‘Action!’ It’s all really gentle and in your own time. He subtly manoeuvres you into your own story. He puts you in these situations and trusts you to make something out of it.” The result was a hit at Cannes (winning best screenplay for Paul Laverty) and propelled Martin Compston into a new world, which came as a total surprise to him. “I genuinely thought I’d make the film and that would be it.” It was only when he started getting roles afterwards that he realised this might be a bona fide career. “A lot of this is right time, right place. You can be the best in the world, but if nobody casts you, there’s nothing you can do.” He spent three years in the BBC1 drama Monarch of the Glen, where he learnt the more pedestrian skills of TV acting. “That was like grammar school to me: work to your mark, think about camera angles.” Now, via Line of Duty, he’s arrived at In Plain Sight, an ITV three-parter about some truly gruesome murders that happened in 1950s Lanarkshire. Compston leads the In Plain Sight cast as serial killer, Peter Manuel, in a cat-and-mouse scenario with Douglas Henshall’s detective, William Muncie. View oEmbed on the source website It’s a role that has caused him, not self-doubt exactly, but a lot of questioning: “It’s hard to say these things, but on purely acting terms it’s an amazing part to play, the challenge of getting round it all. But you’ve got to remember that all his victims have families who loved them, who are still alive. It can’t all be him taunting the police, being brazen. “One scene I thought was very important was Isabelle Cooke, just dancing. She’s the picture of life, the epitome of youth. These people shouldn’t just be defined as his victims. They were real people who had lives.” In Plain Sight is shocking in its detail (“I think people will be struck by the severity of the crimes,” says Compston), yet it chooses psychological tension over blood and guts. Muncie was dogged in his pursuit of Manuel, but the killer was equally obsessed with the detective. “He dropped birthday cards through his door, just to let him know he was close by. It was quite horrific, what this guy would do. It was my job to portray the madness without being too graphic.” It’s not your classic period drama but, “they’ve done a magnificent job of recreating the time. It’s stylised. It’s beautiful.” Compston and Douglas Henshall in ITV's In Plain Sight The contrast between work and home couldn’t be starker: professionally, he’s spending his time trying to find some way to iterate the darkest, most repulsive parts of human nature. “It’s the darkest thing that I’ve ever played and I’m sure ever will play. I was aware of who he was. He’s a sort of bogeyman in Scotland, but I was never aware of the depths of his depravity. He really was the embodiment of a psychopath – he had no empathy. By all accounts he could be charming. He was a great artist. But he was almost pantomime evil.” Make sure to read the true story of Peter Manuel for more context behind the In Plain Sight story. Some combination of art and life has wrought a change in the way Compston approached the role. “In days gone by, I’d have been locked in a darkened room for days. Normally, I’m an instinctive actor, I go with my gut. But I’m getting older, and this was more of a technical role for me. I didn’t feel emotionally connected to it. I definitely approached it differently.” In real life, in June, he married the American actor Tianna Chanel Flynn, an event that produced some of the cutest wedding photos of all time. View oEmbed on the source website “It’s been an interesting start to the marriage, no honeymoon and playing a serial killer. She’s a very patient woman. I’ve seen her for about four days since we got married. She’s very supportive and has family in Ireland as well. Hopefully, she’ll get over here before too long.” Having acted for 15 years, he’s learnt a lot about how to do it without being changed for the worse. “In the past, I’ve got into this rut of staying in hotels and planes and being on your own and you just get too comfortable with it. You have to remember to be in the world.” Line of Duty diehards will be relieved to hear that neither work nor play can divert him from playing Steve Arnott, who’ll be back in a fourth series, this time on BBC1. “We’ve been doing this for nearly six years now. It’s good to be a character that you’ve made your own. You have to guard against complacency, but I know him inside out. I love slipping on that waistcoat and being Detective Arnott again.” His love for the copper leaps off the screen; he laces the part with complexity and depth. His Lanarkshire villain can’t hope to capture the viewer’s heart, but will stalk their dreams. Read more: Where was In Plain Sight filmed? All the Glasgow filming locations revealed In Plain Sight is on ITV at 9pm tonight (7th June). Looking for something else to watch? Check out our TV Guide or for more news head to our Drama hub.
Why we’re already loving new Sewing Bee host Joe Lycett
Queen of Innuendo Claudia has departed - long live King of Punning Joe Lycett!
For a man who once joked about slaughtering a fox in his Live at the Apollo show, the transition to fronting cosy BBC2 stitch-athon The Great British Sewing Bee could have been a bumpy one. But Joe Lycett is taking it in his stride(s). From sporting a tattoo of judges Patrick Grant and Esme Young, to comfortably chatting about baggy bottoms (of the jumpsuit variety) with the contestants, softly-spoken Joe is already proving himself a natural successor to Queen of Innuendo Claudia Winkleman... He dresses the part What he lacks in sewing skill, Joe makes up for with his jazzy wardrobe – rather fitting for a show that prides itself on celebrating creativity and fashion flair alongside technical skill. He’s previously proven he’s a snappy dresser, both in his Instagram posts and in the hot pink feathered jacket we see in the show previews, but in episode one he’s upped his game. Sporting mint green nails and a rainbow jacket, he chats merrily about which print he’d pick for his underpants and rummages in the haberdashery for the most garish fabrics. He's keen to learn The fact that he’s learning dressmaking lingo along the way only adds to Joe's charm. The self-confessed sewing newbie gets to ask the questions we’re asking at home. Like what is an invisible zip? And “that’s a dart, isn’t it?” He has the required sense of humour Of course the wry sense of humour that made his name is one of the things Joe was hired for but when you're following a class act like Claudia, you need to be at the top of your game. In this first episode, Joe delights in Sheila’s glorious decision to make an outfit for Rhianna in the denim refashion challenge. “Yesterday you were making an outfit for Rhianna. Can I guess this is for Stormzy?” he remarks the next day as she gets stuck into a cotton jumpsuit. And in future weeks we can only hope for some punning of the quality he shared on Twitter after being announced as the new Sewing Bee host: “My mum loves this show and she’s bursting at the seams she’s sew excited! Weave talked about it and she says I’m tailor made and I’ll have the contestants in stitches.” He's here to help While we revel in the contestants' triumphs, we secretly enjoy the drama of their mistakes too, and the presenter’s gig is as much about lightening the atmosphere and offering a shoulder to lean on as it is to count down the clock. So Joe’s on hand to offer a boost as the contestants sweat it out with their unpickers. He picks up their fabric scraps, helps them fit their garments on to the dummies in the last 30 seconds and pops up at their sewing stations to offer a friendly ear when they start to panic. “Is this helping or is this distracting?” he asks, as he gives Tom a massage. We may be just one episode in but Joe’s already making the move from stand-up comic to prince of prime-time comfort telly look easy. Plus we can’t wait to see what he’s wearing next week… Zoe Williams is Digital Editor of Simply Sewing The Great British Sewing Bee continues on Tuesdays at 9pm on BBC2
How One of Us writers Jack and Harry Williams became TV's hottest talents
First they brought us The Missing, now the brothers are back with a new noir-ish thriller
Brothers Jack and Harry Williams are best known to viewers for their spellbinding BBC thriller The Missing. But they’re known in the business as the writers most likely to get a script onto a screen — or in the rather panto terminology of the television industry, “get it away”. So it’s no surprise to see their new drama, One of Us, stride into primetime. Stylish, moody, compulsive, a little bit Scandi, yet at the same time utterly British, from its Agatha-Christie-esque set-up — a small, two-family gang in remotest Scotland, one of whom must be a murderer — to its obsession with the weather, which, in episode one at least, is a character in its own right. Meet the cast of One of Us Meet One of Us star Joanna Vanderham: she’s had an Emmy nod and five hit TV shows at 25 One of Us review: a clever, chilling and original thriller The pair vie with one another to see who can look most awkward when given a compliment, but once that’s out of the way, they love to talk about the process. “Most shows that are bad,” Jack generalises, smiling but meaning it, “come from people underestimating an audience, thinking people won’t understand, that they’re stupid. You’re screwed if you do that. You have to assume the audience is brighter than you are.” This is one of the first things you notice about One of Us— that it has elegantly avoided any clunky exposition that a real-life family would never say. This isn’t only their skill, Harry adds hastily. “We’re not unique or alone or the first to think that audiences are sophisticated and can understand complicated things. Television has changed. What’s possible has changed. Developers have become more trusting.” This is partly, though not completely, driven by ambitious, epically long American dramas like Breaking Bad— “It was unbelievably good,” Harry says. “I still think about it most days.” “I wouldn’t want to live in LA, though,” Jack says, “we’d be way too hot.” “That’d be awful,” Harry agrees, “we’d be on a plane the whole time.” Jack shakes his head: “I’d be addicted to Valium.” Their double act is an artful shambles — modest and funny — and it’s easy to see why they started off in comedy, writing Roman’s Empire and Honest. “You never finish comedy,” says Harry. “You never felt like you’d done a day’s work. Because you were always waiting for the laugh." “The thing is,” Jack says, “we had each other’s laugh, and then the deafening silence of England...” “And America,” deadpans Harry. “And sometimes America,” continues Jack. “We managed to disappoint on two continents.” It was when they wrote The Missing that they really discovered their talent, although, they are careful to stress, quite by accident. But the drama didn’t meet universal approval — some found it exploitative, specifically of the Madeleine McCann story, but that’s a view they don’t accept. “Maybe if we were trying to use [the abduction of a child] as a cheap shock, but that was never in our heads,” says Jack. Harry is more trenchant. “A dead body, a missing kid... if you handle these things glibly, wheeled on as a plot point in CSI, that’s not ideal. But is it morally wrong? No. Just don’t watch it, dude.” One of Us is chilling in a different way, with its noir-ish atmosphere and its masterful ominousness. Just watch it, dude. This article was originally published in Radio Times magazine in August 2016
Meet One of Us star Joanna Vanderham: she’s had an Emmy nod and five hit TV shows at 25
“I promised my mum that if I didn’t make it by 28, I’d retrain”
Joanna Vanderham has an air of sleeves-up, get-it-done practicality, spliced with mercurial beauty, winning mischief, and a deep passion for her work. However, she starts our interview by giving a really dodgy housekeeping tip – when I realised I’d got chewing gum on my skirt, she offered the following advice: “I’m sure you can iron it off. No, wait, is that wax?” She is instantly believable in all things, on screen and off, but don’t believe her on chewing gum. Meet the cast of One of Us How One of Us writers Jack and Harry Williams became TV's hottest talents One of Us review: a clever, chilling and original thriller In One of Us, she plays Claire, a nurse whose cherished brother has been murdered, along with his new wife. As she supports her mother and other brother – as well as the neighbours, who were parents to her dead sister-in-law – it’s plain that she is the lodestar of the group, its unwavering moral north: everyone else is either too immature or too messed up. One of Us So it’s a new gear in her six-year career, which started fast – her first job, a lead role in 2011 Sky1 drama The Runaway, earned her an International Emmy nomination – and only got faster. She’s played the arch, high-class beauty (in Dancing on the Edge), the grafting, plucky beauty (in The Paradise), and the heroine in Banished and The Go-Between, but she hasn’t, until now, been the grown-up of the piece. She gives a fascinating, big-hearted but small-gestured performance, especially in her scenes with Juliet Stevenson, who plays her mother. “At the start of filming,” she says, “I’d been thinking, ‘How do I get on with Juliet?’ And she grabbed my arm, and said, ‘I think I’ll hold on to you.’ And that was it. For three months, she held my arm. We were each other’s rock, you can see it in the episodes, when she goes to sit down, I’m right there with her.” She makes a face that I decode as, “Does that make us sound like luvvies?” and continues: “Juliet was quite good at making sure we’d all discussed what had happened before each scene, how each of us were feeling, she created intense mini-rehearsals before each scene... but at the same time, she’s such a big child. We spent so many hours discussing how awful our jeans were.” One of Us And they certainly were – the least flattering denim you’ve seen on TV since Jeremy Clarkson left Top Gear. Which is part of the charm: it’s a very intense drama, with many very visually striking moments, characters making life-changing decisions, standing in a barn, lit from behind, like Reservoir Dogs. Vanderham – born in 1991 in Scone, a village in Perthshire – takes an unstudied, unguarded delight in her work: “I have an overwhelming urge to tell stories. I don’t know why. I don’t know where it comes from.” She has none of the blasé patina that people get when they come from a showbiz family. Her mother, a cardiovascular specialist in Dundee, “made me promise that if I hadn’t made it by the time I was 28, I would retrain. I don’t know what ‘made it’ means, in her view. And I don’t know why 28. But I wouldn’t ever want to give up.” Whatever the mysterious criteria were, she is pretty certain to have met them. Apart from her apparently effortless TV success, she has also played Desdemona with the RSC, a performance for which she won some stunning reviews that have made apparently no dent in her self criticism. It was a daunting role. “A 1,200-seat theatre – we started tech [rehearsals], and I walked on stage, and my throat closed up, and I started to cry. I had a little anxiety attack, which I’ve never had in my life. I’d like to do that part again. I want another go. I’ve learnt a lot since last year.” She’s currently starring alongside Ralph Fiennes in Richard III at the Almeida Theatre in north London, as Lady Anne, who famously dies pretty early but has to come back at the end as a ghost. “There are fabulous stories about the ghosts all going to the pub, and coming back pissed. Sometimes I almost forget my cue and come up a very breathless ghost.” Richard III She has no career role model, as such, but will make an exception for Grace Kelly. “She acted in 11 films, won an Oscar and then married a prince. She didn’t do too badly.” I raise an eyebrow at the idea that she would give this up to marry anybody, prince or not, and she says: “This is my idea of modern feminism: men and women are not the same, we’re equal in different ways, and if that means I earn more than you but you want to open the door for me, great.” It’s good she doesn’t want to marry someone more succesful than her, I say, as that would seriously shrink her pool. “Thanks. Wow. That is beyond depressing.” I insist that it’s a compliment, the inevitable result of having done so much so young. “We’ll see what happens. Those thoughts have crossed my mind. But you can’t worry about it because that’s a waste of energy, isn’t it? Just as I can’t worry about the fact that you’ve just cursed me to be permanently alone.” She has a wonderful dialectical quality to her, carefree but intense, confident enough to take risks but careful and modest. There isn’t much light nonchalance in her performance in One of Us, but her range and magnetism are becoming ever clearer. She hates watching herself on screen: “I had to remake my showreel earlier this year, and I was going, ‘I can’t believe this was recorded. Please can this never be witnessed again.’ I got six minutes out of my six-year career and thought, ‘This’ll do.’” It’s a comically harsh and utterly wrong judgement, but fortunately, the world thinks differently. This article was originally published in Radio Times magazine in August 2016 View oEmbed on the source website
"You're not playing that berk are you?" The Crown's Matt Smith and Claire Foy explain how they've fallen for the royal family
As the lavish Netflix drama returns to our screens, the two leads talk common misconceptions about Elizabeth and Philip
Matt Smith is on a one-man mission to rehabilitate the Duke of Edinburgh. Prior to the first series of The Crown, the Queen’s husband was primarily known for making unfortunate remarks on state visits. “There’s a common misconception about him,” Smith says patiently. “When I told my grandad about the role he said, ‘Bloody hell, you’re not playing that berk, are you?’ But if you read up on him, he’s quite the opposite – he’s very intelligent, he’s quite precise, he’s got great wit.” Watching Smith look effortlessly majestic in Prince Philip’s scarlet Grenadier Guards uniform during filming at Clarence House, you’re also reminded that he was incredibly dashing. Everything you need to know about The Crown season 2 Matt Smith's Prince Philip will be 'centre stage' as his marriage to the Queen is put under strain in The Crown season 2 What was Prince Philip really like as a young man? Olivia Colman explains how she got the part of the Queen in The Crown season 3 Discover the real history behind Netflix's The Crown “The facts of the situation are that she was completely infatuated with him. He was a dreamboat,” says Claire Foy, who has wowed audiences with her portrayal of the Queen. “But they also had a lot in common and they seemed to understand each other in a way that was really special. They had a common sense of humour, and a common way of communicating.” View oEmbed on the source website The Crown’s smash-hit first season for Netflix sprang a few surprises on the Windsors’ loyal subjects, not least of which was how much of a wildcard match Philip was for Elizabeth and how far he would have been from the first choice of a royal-marriage-arranger. It was a love-match island in a sea of duty. By the start of season two, however, their marriage is miserable. The year is 1956 and the Duke of Edinburgh is restless in his helpmeet role and missing his naval career. More importantly, he has fallen in with a bad crowd, and has a “thing” going on with a ballet dancer. Alienated from the Queen, he goes off on a tour of the Commonwealth and, free from the scrutiny of the press, controversially grows a beard. “There’s an interesting balance to be struck,” Smith explains, “between trying to be truthful and authoritative and not being too syrupy. You only need to go a little bit in this direction and it’s too reverent; and in that direction, and it’s too liberal and sneery and anti-them.” The whole project, written by Peter Morgan (the man who also brought us Helen Mirren in the 2006 film The Queen), is a tightrope between staying true to the facts and telling a story that gets to the root of a relationship about which so little is known. As Claire Foy says, “What everybody doesn’t know about the royal family is that there are no facts. It’s all conjecture. That’s what Peter does so well. He doesn’t place the truth anywhere. He leaves it for people to figure out for themselves.” Matt Smith adds, “This is the reason that they’ve endured – they’ve never allowed us behind the palace walls. They’ve kept the illusion, that mystique.” Into that lacuna of discretion where decades of gossip should be, The Crown has poured a universal story of marital disappointment and disillusionment, laced with the very specific circumstance of this family, at that time: they could never divorce; they could only endure. “There is a fracture in their marriage that neither of them is quite willing or able to address. Their problems are universal. The things that touch them are the things that would touch anybody,” Foy says. “But that feeling that there is no way out… it’s easier to understand when you realise their marriage is the symbol of Christianity in the United Kingdom.” For all the sparse and elegant tenderness of the script, the great wells of sorrow in Foy’s eyes when she’s playing the Queen and the stubborn, battened-down anguish in Smith’s Duke speak volumes on their own. It helps that they’ve both fallen, totally, for their characters. “He was essentially orphaned,” Smith explains. “His mother was committed, his father went off to Monaco and he was sent off to live with his uncle.” Add in an education at Gordonstoun boarding school in the Highlands, which became known as Colditz in kilts, and Prince Philip becomes a much more human character. The Queen, though, probably comes off as the most beset this season, battling the Suez Crisis brought on by a flapping Conservative government led by Anthony Eden (brilliantly played by a thin-lipped Jeremy Northam). “Looking back at the decisions people made [during Suez], you can see them in a context and maybe that reminds us all to just pause for a moment before making choices. Because you’ve got to accept the consequences,” says Foy. It seems that, like the royal character she plays on screen, Foy has developed a delicate diplomacy, never sounding thoughtless or Pollyanna-ish, always treading carefully. But you can’t help thinking that despite talking about Suez she is drawing a parallel with Brexit. “The Crown shows that a lot of people who were in charge didn’t take those consequences into consideration. They were only concerned with their moment in history, as opposed to thinking of generations to come, who would live with what they decided to do.” Asked whether the series has made her more of a monarchist, Foy says, “As far as I’m concerned, I live in a country that has a monarchy and I appreciate everything they do. I have huge respect for Elizabeth and her family and the things they’ve done as people. The monarchy as an institution is a very complex thing, and it’s not necessarily something I identify with.” Claire Foy was born to play British royals – her performance as Anne Boleyn in the BBC adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall was magnetic. “Well, I’ve always been fascinated by Anne Boleyn, but we all have, haven’t we? Come on. She had six fingers! She’s always been an exotic bird.” View oEmbed on the source website This is The Crown’s final season for the current protagonists in their young incarnations: season three will be recast, though we’ve no more details as yet, other than that Olivia Colman will play the Queen in her middle years. It’s clear how much the current leads have been drawn into the Windsors. “Prince Philip’s my barometer on everything,” Smith says stoutly, “even on whether or not to have an Instagram account [neither of them does]. I have been inhabiting him for the last two years.” And yet both Smith and Foy have made their peace with the recast. Foy is a free spirit and couldn’t imagine being pinned down by anything. “This idea that, when you get to be a grown up, you’ve got to have sorted everything out and live the same life… I think the expectation that anyone is ever going to do that is slightly ridiculous.” Plus, she says, the pressure of the second series is already a burden: “It’s more difficult because you can’t try to re-create what made it successful the first time around. You have to just approach it as if you’ve never done it before, and you have to be attentive, and not let things slide, and not be complacent.” Smith, meanwhile, has experience of walking out of a part at the peak of his performance – his Doctor Who regenerated into Peter Capaldi. “Oh yeah, I’ve been through it, I always knew it was going to happen. It’s absolutely not a problem; it’s one of the things that gives the show a real chance of having a life cycle.” Doctor Who, in one way, was a different beast altogether. “From the moment I was cast, I’d walk down the street, and people would come up to me and go, ‘You can’t break the Doctor.’” Yet, while the difference in popularity of these two parts is stark, they’re ultimately not so different, Smith points out. “They’re more similar than you’d think: they’re both sort of aliens, both outcasts. Now that would be a great episode – Doctor Who with a young Prince Philip.” The Crown season two is available to watch from Friday 8th December on Netflix
Elizabeth Debicki: I’m a mining actress, trying to find what’s underneath and bring it out
The Australian star set Tom Hiddleston’s heart racing in The Night Manager – now she’s the lead in an Aussie take on Scandi-noir
Elizabeth Debicki’s career reminds me of Uma Thurman’s, and not just because both are so tall, and so extravagantly beautiful, that they look like people from the future. One minute, Debicki was the surprise newcomer, giving a spirited but wry and subtle performance as socialite Jordan Baker in Baz Luhrmann’s film version of The Great Gatsby – a big break she describes as “strange and unusual. Many factors contributed to it, mainly Baz, who throws the net out so wide. It was, like, my second audition out of drama school.” Cinephiles said that she stole the screen from Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan. Next, for the rest of us, there she was as Jed in The Night Manager, stealing the screen from the likes of Tom Hiddleston, Olivia Colman and Hugh Laurie. Jed was an archetype in some ways – the bad guy’s moll, missing her son, smiling wide, bleak smiles at a malevolent Laurie – but simultaneously unusual, ten warring emotions under every expression, haunting sadness in every gesture. Now her leading role in The Kettering Incident, which was actually filmed in Tasmania before The Night Manager, feels as natural as casting Judi Dench as M. She plays Anna Macy, who has fetched up as a doctor in London, having left her backwater Tasmanian birthplace 15 years previously, but is now back on home territory. And while it starts with notes of the supernatural – UFOs, disappearances, a dream-like pace – a detective story emerges that will inevitably invite comparisons with Scandi-noir. “You don’t really get the sense of pace, when you’re reading something, but I knew it was going to be a slow burn,” she recalls. “I was always doing so much that I didn’t really think of it being slow, it was an onslaught for me. It’s sort-of like The Killing or The Bridge, in that procedural way, but the characters are interesting enough that you understand it chunk by chunk, peeling until you get to the core.” In fact, she didn’t watch either of those Nordic thrillers until after she’d made The Kettering Incident. “I’m always late for every party, but I’m actually glad this time, because I probably would have been heavily influenced by them – I’m obsessed with The Bridge. Instead, I did my own version of what Anna was, she’s quite raw in a way, and she unravels really interestingly.” The Kettering Incident She did something similar in The Night Manager, though as performances they couldn’t be more different: she created a character you would never have become so attached to on the basis of John le Carré’s original novel. “When we set out to make The Night Manager, we were all very aware that in the book – and John le Carré doesn’t mind me saying so, he’s said it to me before – Jed was quite lacking in dimension. I just don’t think she was his focus. Also, in that genre, women just become a strange projection of male fantasy, they don’t seem to think or feel anything; if something ripples their surface, they instantly recover. And you wonder where their soul is, really. I wouldn’t know how to play a role like that, I’m more of a mining actress, trying to find what’s underneath and bring it out.” Debicki wasn’t mining on her own in trying to bring to Jed a meaningful fragility rather than an expedient vulnerability. “Susanne [Bier, the director] would never have put a female role in a spy show who wasn’t multi-dimensional, who didn’t have an inner life. It worked with Olivia [Colman, who played Tom Hiddleston’s grumpy, pregnant spy-runner, a man in the book] and it felt quite organic while we were doing it. “But watching it back now, there’s this interesting strain through the story, about motherhood, maternal instinct and maternal love, what the meaning of life really is. You need that when you’re dealing with a story about the arms race and men killing men, and men looking for meaning. We didn’t sit down and say, ‘We’ve got to make that character interesting,’ she just became interesting. It’s partly Susanne herself, a woman so full of love and her own secrets, and deeply intelligent.” The reception to The Night Manager, or more precisely, her role in it, crept up on her as the series progressed, even though many critics had predicted it would become hugely popular. “We were a bit flummoxed, as well as delighted,” she says. “It’s an interesting thing with film and TV, you can never judge what the climate is, what the world is doing at that moment, for the show to make that kind of impact.” She’s not naive – one of her first roles was opposite Cate Blanchett and Isabel Huppert in an Australian stage production of Genet’s The Maids, which she describes as “the best acting class ever” – but drily calls the rest of The Night Manager cast “a pretty epic line-up of your nearest and dearest national treasures”, and says she’s glad that she hadn’t seen Broadchurch before they started filming, otherwise she’d have been more intimidated than she already was by Colman. She also shares in our national consensus that Hiddleston is basically perfect. The Great Gatsby Her acting trajectory is a formal one, and reads like that of a 1950s starlet. During her degree at the Melbourne College of Arts, she won a bursary for outstanding work in her second year, which she says didn’t mean anything, beyond “that it was a scholarship to the final year of school, which is amazing when you can’t withdraw 20 dollars from your bank account”. It meant rather more than that, since it landed her an agent, accelerated her career and showered her on audiences across three continents. “I’m beginning to recognise that how people’s careers look from the outside is very different from how they feel on the inside,” she says archly. “For an actor, six months of not working at the start of your career feels like an eternity. That’s the thing that rises to the surface for me, when I think of how it began.” But what makes the Melbourne-raised actress want to live over here? She recently spent time at the National Theatre in David Hare’s The Red Barn. “It’s a strange thing, being Australian, you feel that you can roam around forever. In London, I felt that anywhere you turned your creative energy, you would be rewarded. Another thing that struck me was how incredible the audiences are. We sold out a play on a Tuesday night. It’s two degrees outside, but people will get on a tube and go and see a play on a Tuesday.” I suspect there are quite a few cities where Debicki could sell out a one-woman mime, outdoors, about the plague. The Kettering Incident requires no such privations; all you need is your sofa and a high tolerance for mystery, luminously drawn. The Kettering Incident is on tonight at 10pm and 11.10pm on Sky Atlantic
Peter Capaldi on being an "older" Doctor, the Time Lord's favourite newspaper and why not-cool is suddenly cool
The Twelfth Doctor also reveals why the inter-galactic character is just like Santa...
Peter Capaldi is striding around the Tardis set in the Cardiff studio, fretting like a host whose oven isn’t working. “I can’t turn the lights on because we don’t have any electricians here today,” he says, apologising for the lack of technical support that means we are peering at each other in semidarkness inside television’s most famous time machine. “So you don’t really get a sense of what fun the Tardis is. It’s quite cozy. Quite wombish and warm. People are always happy to film here. It’s not like being in Midsomer Murders, is it? There isn’t another programme in Britain in which you get to roam around 21st-century Venus.” View oEmbed on the source website At the age of 58, the incumbent Doctor brought something quite new to the role, an element that the younger Who fan wouldn’t even remember, growing up with David Tennant and Matt Smith – a sober, grownup demeanour that some people might call grumpiness. When he talks about his Who, Capaldi is anything but cranky, always almost-smiling, on the brink of some joke that he sometimes tells and sometimes chooses not to. How does it feels to be an old Who after a string of young ones? “Surely you mean older? The Doctors I grew up with were not young. To me, Doctor Who was not a young man. Ironically, I’m older than any of those, except for William Hartnell.” William Hartnell, the first Doctor The Tardis itself hasn’t changed very much since Matt Smith’s time. There’s a stack of Marshall amps, a nod to the idiosyncrasy of Capaldi’s Doctor being madly into guitars, and the odd piece of 60s furniture, but “I think it cost so much that it would have been a poor use of taxpayers’ money to get rid of Matt’s and replace it with mine”. As a brand, the show is so successful, internationally, that surely no amount of Tardis-building could break its bank? “It’s complicated: it is a brand, so it has to be sold. But the actual spirit of it is quite personal and small. So you have to look after that a bit, but also go and be a salesman for it. “I go on tours with the show, and if you go to South Korea, Australia or South America… In Mexico, the fans were just so wonderful, and passionate, and… Latin!” The intensity and spread of international fandom took a bit of getting used to. “I found it hard at first. You walk on stage and it makes people go crazy, not because you’re me, because you’re Doctor Who. When you see little kids, that’s fantastic. A wee bit like being a mythical character, like the Wizard of Oz or Santa Claus.” Famously, when Peter Capaldi was announced in the role, a fan letter came to light that he’d written to RT in 1974 aged 15. View oEmbed on the source website It seemed like a perfect alignment of the stars, the ultimate human fulfilment, that an actor could become the hero of his youth. It annoys him a bit now. “It makes it sound as if I spent my life, my career, grieving that I wasn’t the Doctor. Which is not the case,” he says stoutly. “As a kid I loved the Doctor, but as a teenager I moved on, and discovered sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll like everybody else!” As a graduate of the Glasgow School of Art, Capaldi honed skills that he retains to this day, as shown in his artwork for this very feature (see how you could win it here). The role of the Doctor is such a consuming one that it’s easy to forget what he was famous for before: that splenetic, hyper-intelligent energy he brought to the screen, most memorably in the BBC’s painfully good satire, The Thick of It. View oEmbed on the source website Yet it’s not as though he’s moved into “family entertainment” as such. Doctor Who has become more and more cerebral, or certainly, less and less easy to explain to a nine-year-old, unless you’re really concentrating. “The thing about Doctor Who is the constitution of the audience. It covers a huge age range, so you have to entertain little kids and you have to entertain hipsters and students, and middle-aged men who should know better. “So sometimes there is a kind of metaphysical and intellectual aspect to it, which is more to the fore than other times. But generally we just blow up monsters. There are some moments when you feel, that’s a little bit silly, or that’s a bit mawkish or whatever, but then you realise, that’s for children. You would be a fool not to play to them, because it’s their show.” The studio is empty of action but Capaldi is speeding down the obligatory Doctor Who corridor then spins round to show how he injured his knee last year. “When I first had lunch with Matt Smith, he arrived on crutches. I said, ‘What happened?’ and he said, ‘This show, this show.’ I thought, ‘My God, he’s 14, and he still injured himself.’ ” Apart from its global appeal, the other unusual thing about Doctor Who, the telly Holy Grail, is how long it has lasted. Obviously, the regeneration helps – “Any show would be thrilled with the opportunity to get rid of the leading man or woman and replace them with someone else.” The creative vision regenerates, too – Steven Moffat will have left by 2018, to be replaced by Chris Chibnall, creator of Broadchurch. Within that, there’s something special about the Doctor. “If you’d said to anyone 12 years ago, ‘Doctor Who is going to come back, and it’s going to be this international smash,’ you’d have said, ‘You’re kidding. How can the world embrace this thing we’ve already given up on? With cardboard sets and rubbery models and overacting?’” View oEmbed on the source website Capaldi sees the love for Doctor Who as a proxy affection for Britishness, because he’s such a British hero – he has no superpowers, no incredible strength. He isn’t square-jawed or sixpacked. All he has is a screwdriver, like Super-DIY-Dad. He seems to spend a lot of time thinking, which is the opposite of what heroism is supposed to be about. “I’m sure he gets the Guardian,” Capaldi says. “That’s how he seems to me. He’s always been someone who gets the Guardian. There are some parts of the universe where it’s harder to get hold of.” Capaldi has a metaphysical, also psychological explanation of the Doctor’s appeal: “It’s one of the nice things about the show, it’s not encouraged in the publicity, but it is quite… sad. This death motif… A lot of the young people I meet who love it, they tend to feel slightly outside, not part of the gang. In a way, it’s a show for not-cool people, which now has suddenly become for cool people as well. People’s relationship with the show is very personal.” Then he drops this bombshell. “He’s really not human at all. That’s what I believe. Who you see is what he has chosen to present, because that’s the only way that humans can understand him and what he is.” But… but how can he understand the human condition, if he has no human traits? I protest, my faith momentarily shattered. “The truth is,” says Peter Capaldi, “he comprehends it too much. His problem is that he sort of knows everything. That makes life quite hard.” The Doctor Who Christmas special is on BBC1 on Christmas Day
10 things that made this Great British Sewing Bee brilliant
The highs, the lows, the lingerie, the steely new judge, the wisecracking host and dedicated contestants from all walks of life have made series four one to treasure, says Zoe Williams
Phew! Who knew suit alterations or inserting a shirt collar could feel so tense? Monday night’s final of The Great British Sewing Bee saw Charlotte, Joyce and Jade grappling with pin tuckets, plackets and yokes to sew up beautiful evening wear and fight for the crown of Queen Bee of the amateur sewing world. But it's not all drama... Along with the tears, scandals (well, sort-of scandals) and some occasionally saucy sewing, we've had sartorial successes, heart-warming moments from a diverse bunch of contestants, one-of-a-kind judges and the ever wise-cracking host Claudia Winkleman – Simply Sewing magazine is here to round-up the best bits of series four... 1. When things go wrong View oEmbed on the source website Obviously we’re rooting for the contestants to impress the judges, aren’t we? But sometimes it all goes gloriously wrong and when it does we just can’t look away... Even the most promising sewists can crumble under the pressure of the sewing room cameras (think back to Jamie’s shock exit in week three after being undone by the stresses of lingerie week). We could barely watch when the usually cool and calm Charlotte became unraveled in the final by a dress shirt collar. Who knew a seam allowance could cause so much angst? After stitching her seam a mere 5mm out, her whole garment began to go downhill, sending into her into a panic rush that spiralled her into third place in the first challenge of the night. Did anyone else detect a note of barely disguised glee from the judges? While our hearts sank for Charlotte, the judges looked on with Esme commenting “She’s panicking a bit isn’t she? It’s a shame.” Hmmmm. 2. When things go right View oEmbed on the source website Seeing the contestants excitedly call home to share their triumphs was a staple of each episode, and the various facial expressions, yelps and screams of delight were contagious. Although possibly the most good-natured competitive sew along to grace our TV screens yet, the series four Bees still weren’t afraid to show off in the sewing room either when things went well… we witnessed a few natty celebratory dance moves along the way. 3. When things get a little racy View oEmbed on the source website As if lingerie week wasn’t enough, with the contests whipping up tiny scraps of fabric into lacy bras, the following week’s PVC alternation challenge further raised temperatures – “Ring a ding ding” exclaimed Claudia. But it was Ghislane’s confession about her home sewing in week one that raised the most eyebrows: “when I make things for myself, every time I make a seam, I like to try it on to see if it fits, and I find it a lot easier to do in my underwear.” Er, you heard it here first – naked sewing is the next big thing. 4. And on a cuter note… On the flip side, part of the show’s charm has been its more innocent moments. Charlotte officially wins our best sewing-wear of the competition award… for her bunny slippers (although they don’t look hugely sturdy to take on the hour-upon-hour of hard sewing machine labour the show demands of the contestants). Meanwhile, Jade’s approach to lingerie week summed up why we loved her, “I think every robe should have a cheeky pocket. You can hide your biscuits in there from your mum when she says you’re not allowed any more.” 5. Binding-gate: rebellion in the sewing room View oEmbed on the source website At 71 years old, grandmother Joyce had already delighted with her weekly confessions of loving a tipple, but in week four she revealed a gloriously stubborn streak when she went rogue and ignored the instructions in the pattern making challenge. The judges weren’t impressed with the binding on her Chinese top, with Patrick nicknaming her ‘the infurating Joyce’. “You’ve done it your own way, you’ve given us a bound edge and you’ve given us a completely different opening, but you’ve done it quite nicely and it sits well. It’s not what we asked for. You’re infuriating Joyce.” Joyce remained unrepentant, claiming “Everyone thinks I went off piste but there were only two things that I did differently,” though she returned the next day with the promise that, “I’m a changed woman today, I’m biddable,” much to Patrick’s amusement. 6. Learning the lingo View oEmbed on the source website From plackets to pin tucks to peplums… if you thought sewing was just attaching buttons to shirts, you’ll come away having discovered a whole new world, and language. Woe betide Angeline when she innocently misprounced Godet in front of Esme. The steely host shot back, “it’s Go-DET”. 7. We love you Claudia View oEmbed on the source website Always on hand to lighten the atmosphere when things got a little fraught, Claudia’s peppy presenting, packed full of sparkling one-liners and quick quips was a great antidote to any tension in the room or on the bobbins. There are too many examples to list here but oh how we chuckled time and again. When Joyce revealed baby gros hadn’t been invented when her babies were young, Claudia responded “What did your babies wear? Hessian?” 8. Patrick’s wardrobe confessions View oEmbed on the source website Immaculately-tailored Patrick surprised us on more than one occasion by the depth of his enthusiasm for the contestants’ creations. Let’s look back to Charlotte’s harem pants in International week: “I’d love to wear something very similar. Possibly even these ones in a quiet moment,” and even better, Tracey’s chosen fabric for her baby gro in week two, that led him to proclaim he’d like a onesie in the same material, to which Tracey responded, “I’ve not got enough fabric Patrick.” 9. New judge Esme showed us how it’s done View oEmbed on the source website With her at times steely manner and impressive credentials (she teaches pattern cutting at famous fashion college Central Saint Martins and designed the outfits for the Bridget Jones films), we would certainly be nervous about showing off our sewing to Esme, but as series four gathered steam, she revealed a softer side and genuine enthusiasm for the Bees and their efforts to impress. She also stole the show with her eye-catching accessories and outfits. Her jacket from the final alone may win garment of the series, never mind the week. 10. Hooray for Josh View oEmbed on the source website With his football loving, pint-supping good nature, Josh was a breath of fresh air in the sewing room, and he wasn’t afraid to admit when he wasn’t sure what was going on. He blunted his unpicker tool, asked what a chevron was and got confused about the difference between gullets and gussets. His laid-back manner made him popular with his fellow contestants too, and when he exited the sewing bee in week four, he summed up what makes the show special perfectly, saying "It doesn’t matter what stretch of life, what you background is, how long you’ve been sewing for, you can learn very quickly as long as you apply yourself and I hope I’ve proved that to the judges as well as to the people who are watching.” And THAT, dear viewers, is what makes the Sewing Bee so heart warming and infinitely watchable. The final of The Great British Sewing Bee is on Monday 4th July at 9:30pm on BBC2 Want to learn how to make your own clothes? Click here for a free issue of Simply Sewing magazine Offer available to UK residents only. One copy per household. Offer ends 31st July 2016
The Great British Sewing Bee's best quotes
Ahead of the final, we take a look back at some of the best comedy quotes from series four
As series four of The Great British Sewing Bee draws to a close, we'll miss that heady mix of glorious terminology (frogging? godets? peplums, anyone?), unique personalities and Claudia Winkleman’s wise-cracking commentary. Simply Sewing's Zoe Williams looks back at some of the quotes that have brought smiles to our faces... "I got two firsts and I'm going to have two Chardonnays” She may be a 71-year-old grandmother with an eagle eye for pattern matching, but finalist Joyce’s weekly confessions of enjoying a drink or two had us reaching for the corkscrew…“I got two firsts and I'm going to have two Chardonnays” she merrily proclaimed after a double success in sixties week. "It's gone wrong – in ways we couldn’t even have imagined it was possible to go wrong" Series four’s most disastrous garment award has to go to Ghislane for her baby gro in week two. Patrick summarised: “It’s all just gone really badly wrong, in all sorts of ways we couldn’t even have imagined it was possible to go wrong. I think you have to just put this one to the back of your mind…. and the back of the wardrobe.” "When they teach you pi at school you think 'I am NEVER going to use pi in my life'" View oEmbed on the source website Retired teacher Tracey could always be trusted to lighten the mood in the sewing room. When the Bees tackled puzzling patterns in last week’s semi-final she announced, “I’m making a circle skirt… I need to use pi to work out the circumference. When they teach you pi at school you think “I am NEVER going to use pi in my life.., and now I’ve got to use pi.” “I’m a changed woman today, I’m biddable…” After going rogue with her binding in International week’s pattern matching challenge, Joyce thought better of open rebellion in the sewing room, returning the next day in a more malleable mood. “I’m a changed woman today, I’m biddable…” she proclaims, to which Patrick responds wrily “I can’t imagine you ever being biddable.” "That bow looks like a dog biscuit" She’s a pattern matching pro who isn’t afraid to be honest, no matter how nervously the Bees are quaking with fear, and Children’s Week saw perhaps her best put downs. She wasn’t impressed with Rumana’s child’s cape – “Well, I’m sorry but I think that bow is really mean – looks like a dog biscuit,” but perhaps her most cutting comments were saved for Angeline’s mermaid alteration challenge, “they’ve certainly had a hack at this dress… (laughs) personally I don’t like this, and this, it’s almost like 'What else can we put on it? Let’s bung it on'.” Ouch! “I’m just going out to get the pet goat" Host Claudia is always on hand with a wry observation about the contestants’ creations. There are too many one-liners to mention here but we did especially enjoy her proclaiming, on seeing Rumana’s plans to turn a ski jacket into a child’s hot pink flamingo chevron coat, “That’s like a little Freddy Mercury Baby,” or the time she took a shine to Charlotte’s Heidi-style child’s cape: “I’m just going out to get the pet goat – bring him in to watch Doctor Who – that’s what that says. In a good way.” "We’re playing sewing Top Trumps" When the contestants grappled with dressing gowns and robes in week four, Tracey and Jade invented a new game of ‘who's got the hardest garment', with Tracey proclaiming, “But darts aren’t difficult, I think piping’s more difficult than darts. If we’re playing sewing Top Trumps, your piping trumps my darts.” This could take off! My binding trumps your button holes and so on… The final of The Great British Sewing Bee is on Monday 4th July at 9:30pm on BBC2 Want to learn how to make your own clothes? Click here for a free issue of Simply Sewing magazine Offer available to UK residents only. One copy per household. Offer ends 31st July 2016
Art Malik: television has gone backwards - it's no longer colourblind
The actor talked about his new show, Indian Summers, and the real state of diversity in Hollywood
Art Malik first came to national attention in 1984 in ITV’s The Jewel in the Crown, the living definition of “event television”. In those days, that meant the whole country was watching; it was like a national duty, and falling in love with Malik the nation’s new pastime. Then aged 32, he played English-educated Hari Kumar, who fell foul of Tim Pigott-Smith’s embittered policeman Ronald Merrick. “I wanted to take him home; who didn’t?” says Malik. “Who didn’t want to protect this boy from the horrors of what was happening to him?” It was a spectacular start to a career that has taken him from Hollywood to Bollywood, via Holby City. He talks about them all with huge affection: “I jumped at the chance of doing Holby, it’s a great show. It goes out at 8 o’clock, and is probably the last drama of the day when you can get a cross-generational family in front of the telly. And guess what: it’s about as multi-racial as you can get. Why wouldn’t I want to do that?” Now he has arrived at Indian Summers, which critics have been calling the new “Jewel” since the first series was shown on Channel 4 last year. In the series, which returns this week, he plays the Maharajah of Amritpur, a watchful, worldly new addition to the cast. Indeed, this second series has quite a different atmosphere to the first, both more mournful and more charged. Malik doesn’t see the programme in the same light as the drama that launched his career. “It’s set around the same time, yes. But for Paul Scott [who wrote the Raj Quartet of which The Jewel in the Crown is the first novel], it was all about apologising; people apologising for what their nation had done in their name. Indian Summers is different because now we’re looking at what those Asians were feeling. That’s why I wanted to do it. I thought, ‘Oh good, the point of view has changed. We’re generations removed from the apologists for empire.’” This isn’t to say that he thinks the empire has nothing to apologise for, far from it. “People say, ‘We gave them roads, democracy,’ as if somehow [India] was a blank sheet, these millions of people didn’t do anything until [the British] turned up. The fact is that the GDP of that nation prior to the British arriving, 24 per cent of it came from the export of cloth.” He comes to the subtle conclusion that a cultural narrative in which the empire simply berates itself, without reflecting on the perspectives of the people on whom the empire was imposed, hasn’t gathered the wisdom that it could. This thought sends his insights all over the globe. “It’s like the debate with Europe, politicians constantly asking, ‘What are our interests?’ Well, the fact is, are they your interests? Or are they someone else’s interests, which you have just appropriated?” Malik has thought deeply, also, about the issue of race in British television. It’s tempting sometimes to have an unrealistically rosy picture about this, in which we get more evolved as time goes on. This, he says, is not so: TV and film used to be much more colourblind – “Omar Sharif played Doctor Zhivago!” and has since become more insular and nostalgic. “By all means, do a Dickensian series, but am I interested as an actor? No. If you’re going to do another one of the Brontë sisters, am I interested? Hell, no. Not until somebody turns round and says, ‘Art, how do you fancy playing Charles Dickens? How do you fancy playing Prince Charles in this biopic?’ Until those movements come, then no, we haven’t got past anything.” He locates the problem “at the heads of our broadcasters. Look at the people who make the decisions. Whether they’re the head of Bafta or whatever they do, who are they? When will we get a female director-general of the BBC? Where is the colour when you go further up the food chain? It disappears.” Issues that people tend to get exercised about – the all-white Oscar nominations, for instance – he sees as petty distractions. “That’s the most boring thing in the world to talk about. I did a Bond film [The Living Daylights], went on a tour for it,andinFrankfurt,aladyputherhandup and said, ‘Why weren’t you playing James Bond?’ My response to that was skin tone. We’re not past this. Yet in [the real] world, we are past it. People don’t see colour.” He has an elegant brevity in his speech, but it’s always plain what he means: that the wider culture is wonderfully diverse, and moved past ideas of what colour a spy should be decades ago; but the media, and specifically showbiz, hasn’t caught up. Indeed, it seems to be going backwards. Growing up in Balham, south London, in the 1950s and 60s — he's now 63 — Malik has a long view on how it is, and was, to be of Asian descent in this country. “There was so much racism when I was a kid, but it was also ignorant. They’d ask, ‘Why are you in Britain?’ Well, because when you [British] came to India, you told us all that it was the most brilliant place on the planet. Why wouldn’t I want to come here? If I look over my life, yes, the National Front has gone now. No one would ever try and have a ‘rivers of blood’ speech now.” He got a scholarship to Guildhall, where he met his wife, Gina Rowe, who’s a potter. They have two daughters, Jessica, 34, and Keira, 32, who have both followed him into the business, Jessica as a producer, Keira as an actor. He became successful young, and his career has always fallen under a lucky star, disastrous tax bills averted by sudden calls from Hollywood. True Lies, the 1994 film in which he played a terrorist, was probably his international breakthrough moment. “[It was] very much melodrama. We probably would have done True Lies II had 9/11 not happened”. He was never tempted to move to Los Angeles, however: “As a parent, as a husband, saying, ‘We’re going to live in the Hollywood hills’ is fine for a while. But did I want the girls to have an American education? Did I want Gina to give up her pottery?” True Lies, of course, was unusual in 1994 – now it’s almost unheard of for a film to have a bad guy who isn’t a Muslim terrorist or at least linked to one. He never takes that kind of role these days. “There are certain things that I know I don’t want to do any more. Playing out-and-out terrorists who terrorise people and don’t actually move the conversation on are not worth doing. So that’s probably another reason I don’t go back to America, because a lot of it is like that. It’s boring, dull, very lazy writing.” His tone is mellow, ready to parody himself, and wouldn’t dream of calling himself a star – “What does that even mean, star?” he says, “it’s just ‘rats’ backwards” – and he’s always considering how things might look from another vantage point. When I meet him, he hasn’t seen Indian Summers, and says, with a kind of knowing sweetness, “I have no idea whether I’m any good or not. Still waiting, like most actors, for somebody to find out one day that I can’t do it.” He is extremely critical of his early performances, even while acknowledging that, at the start, his naivety was part of the point. He is fascinating on the subject of the work of acting itself. “A lot of television now is wanting to see the person who’s speaking. You never see what the reactions are. I will always say that listening is the most difficult thing to do. To make it look as though you are interested.” Talking about his forthcoming work – some late-career Bollywood, and a part in the revival of Cold Feet – he is unfailingly complimentary. “You want to make sure you’re serving the history of this show, with due diligence and a serious amount of respect. To spend the week watching all five seasons, what joy! To be able to say, ‘I have to do this for research.’ In my pyjamas.” He also hates talking about himself. “You do a disservice to your future audience by giving them too much information about Art Malik. I’m only really important to my friends and family, they’re the ones who want to know about me, and that’s right and proper. To the rest of the viewing audience, all of these things will get in the way of what an audience needs, which is their naivety and my mystery.” Well, that’s an elegant place to conclude, I observe. He smiles. “I’m good at this.”
Broadchurch: Jodie Whittaker and Andrew Buchan on the chemistry that made the show so compelling
"Our characters weren’t nice to each other at all. But because we got on in real life, you believed we’d been together for 15 years"
Jodie Whittaker, dressed for RT’s photoshoot in a tomato-red jumpsuit, conjures up a whole timeline of glamour: she could be in a Sixties Peroni advert, or tie a hanky round her head and she’d look like the land girl every soldier fought for. She has the symmetrical, open features and watchful, curious eyes of a sad heiress from an EM Forster novel. The one person she doesn’t look anything like is Beth Latimer, the grieving mother who, with the rest of a peerless cast, made ITV’s Broadchurch so harrowing. Unshakeably, instinctively modest, she remarks, “If I haven’t got any make-up on, I look like someone who could play a very weathered woman. If you put slap on me, I could be a hot girl in an office.” Whittaker was just one of a thousand reasons why Broadchurch, which sprang into that endless-winter-never-spring of 2013, stapled us all to our sofas. Nothing about it looked like a classic British murder story. There was little artifice to the central couple: “You don’t look at Andy and me and think, ‘They’re a bit Hollywood-looking.’ We’re not Hollywood-looking, we look like people who live in that place.” At the same time, there was nothing depressing about the look of the series. “Usually, grim stories are told with grim backgrounds,” Whittaker continues. “The colours are ashen, greys and blues, it’s urban, it’s cold... But in this, everything clashed, the costumes clashed, the backdrop of summer, that exquisite beach... And then the worst thing happens.” Andrew Buchan, meanwhile, was a portrait of devastation, so it is equally surprising – despite loads of previous incarnations, swashbuckling in The Fixer, rugged in the Cranford Christmas special – to see him so chic and cheerful. He doesn’t really think of himself as popular, certainly not as a “Face”. He swears he never gets recognised unless he deliberately goes out dressed up as one of his characters. Describing his career just after he left Durham University, where he studied modern languages, he says: “My apprenticeship was in places like the Edinburgh Festival with stuff dripping on you. I was always, like, ‘I want to be in grimy coffee shops without a penny to my name.’ I didn’t have any master plan, no.” Whittaker couldn’t be more different: “I always knew I wanted to act. But I also knew that at 18 I had absolutely no desire to go to drama school. So at 14, I started saving: I was going backpacking at 18. At 18, I knew I was going to drama school at 20. At 20, I was going to graduate and work at 23. And I’m a jammy little b*****d, because all of those things played out.” There’s no smugness to her, and she’s not looking for admiration. “When I was travelling, I kept getting these emails going, ‘Your mum and dad have told us what you’re doing, we’re so proud of you.’ And I’d be lying on a beach, drinking a beer, hungover from three days’ drinking, thinking, ‘How is this anything to be proud of?’ I just got a bit fatter. I came back a little pudding.” There is a really fresh, wind-blasting vim to her. Hearing Buchan’s relaxed self-deprecation against Whittaker’s sleeves-rolled-up energy, I can’t help thinking they’d make a perfect real-life couple. But that may just be the huge shadow cast by the show. In reality he’s married to Amy Nuttall (Ethel in Downton Abbey), and Whittaker to American actor Christian Contreras. She waits until Buchan’s out of earshot to say, “Of anyone I’ve worked with, Andrew is by far the most extraordinary. He has something that (a) you can’t teach, and (b) is not about him. He does a different thing in every take – not trying to be tricksy, just because he responds absolutely to what you do. He’s got that masculine anger, as well as a face full of snot and tears that haven’t taken him 55 minutes to drum up. To have someone you think is ace and love hanging out with is just amazing. Our characters weren’t nice to each other at all. But because we got on in real life, you believed we’d been together for 15 years.” As a general rule, things that work on screen also worked in the making of them, being the product of people who understand one another. Buchan recalls, “Despite the fact that we’re basically spending seven and a half hours [on screen] grieving, a lot of the cast were exceptionally witty. It was great to have that craic.” Whittaker adds, “It was one of the most ensemble things I’ve done. I mean, David Tennant and Olivia Colman led it...” Buchan cuts in, “They didn’t lead it that well, though, did they? We were the leaders really...” Whittaker ignores him. “David and Olivia are the funniest, loveliest, most hard-working people. It was like a big family.” Serious for a second, her co-star ensures the writer, Chris Chibnall, isn’t airbrushed. “It’s a credit to the writer as well. Each scene seemed to get harder, but it was always different. The grief always took a different shape, the numbness, the anger.” “You’ve got eight hours, sometimes you’re going to like the characters, sometimes not,” she adds. She turns to Buchan. “Apart from you. Nobody liked you. You cheated on me.” I wonder if not being a parent made playing the grief easier? Neither has children. “I think it’s irrelevant, honestly,” says Whittaker. “You know what love is, you know what loss is. I think we would have played it the same. We’ve all got nieces or nephews or best friends’ children, there’s someone you love and can’t imagine loving more.” Next, he’ll be in ITV’s Great Fire of London as a 17th-century baker (and coincidentally she recently starred in The Smoke on Sky1). There’s to be a second series of Broadchurch, but nobody in the world will say who’s in it. If you’ve got used to this pair married, you’ll have to get unused to it. But if you’re relying on them, separately or together, to stay right at the centre of your home-drama schedule, you’ll be just fine. Broadchurch has been nominated for the Bafta Radio Times Audience Award. It’s up to you to decide the Radio Times Audience Award from the six TV shows shortlisted (Breaking Bad, Broadchurch, Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor, Educating Yorkshire, Gogglebox, The Great British Bake Off). Voting closes 12 noon, 15 May. The British Academy Television Awards are held on 18 May. Vote online at radiotimes.com/bafta. Follow @RadioTimes
Alan Davies: I'm usually the butt of my own jokes
The star of Jonathan Creek talks QI, his cancelled series Whites and finding his way in the world of comedy
You don’t realise until Alan Davies walks into the room that you have entirely contradictory expectations of what he’s going to look like in real life. On the one hand, he is so much a part of one’s cultural history – Jonathan Creek, back this week for a special one-off, has been around since 1997 – that he ought to be solid, beyond familiar, like the statue of Oliver Cromwell outside the Houses of Parliament. On the other hand, his comic persona, in his stand-up routines as well as on QI, is so puckish, so powerfully subversive, that he ought to be about 17, with the crazy, curly hair of the 1980s. When he arrives, he looks like neither Cromwell nor the 1980s – he has a furry parka, still-crazy hair and a faintly apologetic expression. Just turned 47, his children, Susie and Robert, are three and one, which explains the faintest whiff of a person who wouldn’t mind a snooze. He smiles at everybody in the restaurant, walking through it as if he’s just knocked over their drink. This humility spills over into the way he talks about his career; where things have worked out he’s always very keen to place the credit elsewhere. I suppose you could say that his comic persona demands it. It would be a rum old business if he came over as a prima donna, having made himself the butt of all his jokes for the past two and a half decades. But the person created the persona; there’s a well of self-deprecation lurking underneath this self-deprecating comic. Davies can scarcely believe the longevity of Jonathan Creek. “I have young people coming up to me after stand-up gigs saying they used to watch it when they were kids.” He shakes his head. “Makes me sound so old!” It makes us all feel old; I swear the guy on the table next to us is shaking his head as well. “I think David’s [he’s talking about David Renwick, the show’s writer] satirical pen has got a bit sharper in recent years, it’s really got meat on the bone. It’s a very intelligent, crafted piece of drama. But they’ve always been the best prepared, best conceived, most elaborate and complex scripts I’ve ever seen. It’s like the difference between a really amazing bit of furniture that’s going to last for centuries and appreciate in value, and Ikea. We almost never get rewrites. Whereas when I was doing dramas for ITV, I remember turning up one day and there were 76 pink pages [indicating rewrites] in an 80-page script.” It’s interesting that, however long he’s spent on the box, Davies has never himself turned into a piece of TV furniture, a member of the establishment – young people still go and see his stand-up, and there’s nothing an outsider is more suited to than stand-up comedy. And it’s not enough to just keep on swearing, “outsider” is something you have in your bones. This informs and shapes his role on QI, which is the main reason he’s got such cross-generational fandom – it’s a quiz that knows no age limits. I think it’s a bit of a character test, like Radio 4’s I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue – the sort of people who find it funny are not the sort of people who care whether they are its target audience. Bloody-minded. Or high IQ. Or both. Anyway, back to the QI-Alan: “My role on that is to be playful and juvenile, and a little bit delinquent. My instinct is 100 percent to subvert it. I was like that at school. I’m still like that, I can’t fill in a census form properly without pretending there are seven Nigerians living in my house.” Davies arrived at the University of Kent, full of mischief, to study drama in 1984, to find that he had chosen the least mischievous university ever. “It was like a long, dark tunnel,” he remembers. Unlike a number of comedians, he didn’t slot in with a group of like-minded people, let alone find the comic partner who would define his early work. “They had an obsession with sexual politics. Which, if you’re bright and you’re not allowed to be ironic, is quite tiring.” That’s not to say he felt out of step with the politics – it was more the politicisation. “I was comfortable. I’m a feminist, I was anti-nuclear. I was very happy in that environment. But I was never happy doing political jokes. And it’s a bit unfulfilling doing jokes about Conservative politicians.” Looking back, I feel fondly ashamed by the stuff we used to laugh at on 1980s telly. Ben Elton just had to say “Michael Heseltine” and everybody would fall about. “I’ve never been very good at the ‘Rupert Murdoch... what a ****’. It doesn’t come very easily to me to rant about somebody. I’m usually the butt of my own jokes, the fall guy.” He describes the ‘comic voice’: “It means that anything you say is funny. If you go on and say, ‘Hi everyone, I came on the bus today, what a nightmare’, they’ll laugh. Billy Connolly has it, Eddie Izzard has it. And once you find the way that works, you’re sort of stuck with it.” But the impetus to become a comic in the first place goes back as far as the impulse to speak. He lost his mother to leukaemia when he was six, and he considers carefully whether he wanted to be funny because his mum died, or because of the kind of person she was when she was alive. “I think a lot of it comes from my relationship with her when I was little. I remember her laughing at things I did, and that being the best feeling in the world. That’s why I like people laughing at the things that I do, and that would have started when I was probably one.” But if the legacy of her life has been to create this very generous spirit – it’s quite a self-effacing, altruistic thing, isn’t it, to give your life over to make other people laugh? – the legacy of her death is quite different. Even 40 years on the sorrow sounds quite raw, and makes sense of a restlessness that is part of what makes Davies so watchable, whether he’s joking or not. “She was ill for a year before she died. And I think she was finding things difficult. That she was finding the children... well, me. Me in particular, she was finding me quite difficult for a while before she was diagnosed. Then, my understanding of it was that she wasn’t told that her illness was terminal. They decided it would be better, because she had three small children, not to tell her. I don’t think they would have done that to a man, I think it was misogyny. Who knows what she might have done if she’d known? What she might have done for us and what she might have said to us that we would have had for the rest of our lives? I think it was a brutal act.” Stand-up is a brilliant career if you’re successful at it (and that, I realise, is a gigantic “if”). “You just have full control, you don’t have to be commissioned by anyone and no one can cancel you.” But TV fortunes are more changeable. Something like QI might last for a lifetime, but that wouldn’t necessarily be a great thing for the people in it. Davies explains – he’s still really cross, in a vaudeville, quite endearing way – about the BBC cancelling Whites, the comedy in which he played a chef who looked spookily like Marco Pierre White, in 2011. “They killed it after one series. I wanted to meet up to talk about it, and they sent back the message: ‘We will only meet with Alan to reiterate our faith in his talent.’ Totally bizarre. I nearly quit QI over it. I thought they were canning Whites because they had me doing another show. I asked, ‘Is that a factor? Can anyone give me a straight answer on that? If it is a factor, I’d rather quit QI. Will I get cast as anything else? Because QI is never off air. What if someone wanted to cast me as a serial killer, and I’d be perfect for it?’ I worried about that for a bit, and then I came to my senses. But I was quite burnt, I think everyone was quite burnt.” He pauses for a second, I don’t know whether for comic effect or just to decide what to say next. “I’m still quite upset about it, and it’s nearly three years ago.” He grins broadly at his own absurdity. It’s so curious; he genuinely is annoyed about the whole episode, but when the opportunity arises to make himself the ridiculous one, he grabs it with both hands. He is his own fall guy through and through. Once you find a way that works, you’re kind of stuck with it. In a funny way, Jonathan Creek is his respite creativity, the flash points in a long and superbly funny career when he can stop putting himself down and pointing out how ridiculous he is and just act. Jonathan Creek is on Easter Monday at 9:00pm on BBC1.