Monday 31 December 2012

Carry On Censoring

"I'm making a mental note of all the equipment they've got"
As fans of the old Carry On films and Carry On Camping being a particular old favourite, the people over at Melon Farmers were shocked to discover recently that ITV has taken to deleting the old nude scene involving naturists being shown at a cinema at the beginning of the film. In the past they recall it was never censored even when it was shown early in the afternoon and well before the 9.00pm watershed; and it was never censored when we first saw Carry On Camping back in the 1970s. All of a sudden, in the last few months, ITV have decided to censor the nude scene. What a let down.

It appears that ITV have also cut the famous Barbara Windsor bra flying off scene too; something any child in the 70s could recall watching in their front room in the company of their parents. Who'd think, asks Melon Farmers, that in more enlightened times, when people are generally exposed to more nudity, ITV would actually become more prudish?





All of which is not to suggest that shocked censors were amused when the Carry On films were first released. Although they are generaly seen today as harmless slapstick comedies, newly revealed files show that the films, made mostly in the Sixties and Seventies, were considered too ribald for the tastes of the time – with censors demanding extensive cuts and prepared to give many of them X-certificates. Of the 1971 romp Carry On Henry, censors said: 'Every joke has a sexual meaning', and ordered 17 changes. In Carry On Cleo, they demanded the cutting of a shot where Mark Antony, played by Sid James, falls on top of Cleopatra, played by Amanda Barrie, 'so we don’t see him wriggling his legs'. Many of the scenes which ended up on the cutting-room floor were restored into the video versions of the films.

The censors’ concerns are revealed at the British Board of Film Classification, which has allowed access to its archives as part of celebrations to mark its centenary. Made at Pinewood Studios until 1978, the films established the careers of some of Britain's best-loved comedy actors, including Kenneth Williams, Barbara Windsor, Sid James and Hattie Jacques. Between 1958 and 1978, 29 Carry On films were produced. The saga started at a time when Britain finally emerged from the grey post-war gloom.
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Sunday 23 December 2012

Whipping Up A Storm

Having a superpower can be a mixed blessing, according to the newest addition to the cast of quirky cult E4 series Misfits, Karla Crome. Her character in the fourth series is Jess, a straight-talker who can see through people – literally, thanks to her X-ray vision. But would the 24-year-old like to be blessed with the same skill? 'No!' says Crome emphatically, sounding a 'careful-what-you-wish-for' cautionary note. "The power I would like is to be able to turn off negative emotions and bad moods with the flick of a switch. I’m a pretty positive person, so a bad mood is quite a big deal."

Luckily, it’s been all sunny for the young actress in this, her breakthrough year. She was listed as one of the 31 ‘Rising Stars of Tomorrow’ by Screen International (which previously picked Robert Pattinson and Carey Mulligan for the top), played alongside Chloë Sevigny in the hugely successful Sky Atlantic mini-series Hit and Miss and appeared in the one-off BBC2 drama Murder, from The Killing director Birger Larsen. Rather sweetly, she still lives at home in Borehamwood with her mum and dad. There’s clearly something of the little girl about her, as she is currently filming spooky ITV drama Lightfields, where she plays a 15-year-old in 1975. In an interview in today's Independent, she talks to Neela Debnath about joining the cast Misfits and filming those sex scenes...


What was it like working on the new series of Misfits?

It was great, I had such a good time and I absolutely cannot wait to go back. It’s the most fun that I’ve had on a job that I’ve done. So, it was great, I really enjoyed it.

What was your favourite episode or most memorable moment?

It was really good fun. I probably couldn’t remember particular moments but I definitely did laugh every day. But in terms of episodes, for me, visually the fourth episode – I thought it was really well done and I think that it looked great. In terms of development for my own character, I liked the third episode with the three Rudys because it was probably one of the few times where Jess has a bit of emotional depth, something to dig into which was nice to do. Overall I really liked the sixth episode with the rabbit.

Your co-star Joe Gilgun likes to expose himself on set, was there any of that this year?

Yeah but I like the challenge and get mine out as well. There’s a bit of that.

How daunting was coming to work on such a well-known show, given the departure of such loved character?

I was a massive fan, especially of the first and second series of Misfts and I love watching it. […] At the time it felt really new and it was exciting and everything like that. I auditioned for the part of Nikki in second series and missed out on that and I was gutted about that. So to have come back later and be offered this regular part I was delighted, I was really happy about it. Also, daunted by the big shoes I have to fill because it is such an iconic show, iconic characters and everything. You’re bound to be compared, there’s not really anything you can do about that.

On a personal level, what you try and do is serve the script and come in, play out the character how it’s written and just try and enjoy that and work with that. Work with the director and try to create the characters that they and Howard [Overman] had written and serve that and not get caught up in reputation and popularity because you are never really going to win.

So, we’re just enjoying it for what it is and enjoying it because I like acting and seeing it like that. It’s a great part to play, you don’t often get to do those and work with so many people around your own age. So it’s been enjoyable but I don’t think you can spend too much time dwelling on what other people have done before – otherwise you end up getting into a bizarre psychosis.

Do you share any personality traits with Jess?

I like to think I’m a lot more optimistic than she is and a bit more smiley, certainly I think I admire her honesty and don’t like skirting around the issue, I suppose that’s quite true to me.

But I think there’s a lot more fun to be had with Jess. Really, you don’t know a lot about her. I think there’s more fun to be had and I look forward to finding out more about her really because other than the outside elements of her being a bit tough or whatever, I share some of that. But I guess I don’t really know what’s behind that so I can’t say.

Do you know what’s coming up in the next series?

I haven’t got a clue. But a lot of the challenge of this series was introducing a whole bunch of new characters whilst [continuing with] the characters of Curtis and Seth, establishing a new dynamic, new personalities and everything. What I hope for series 5 is that now these characters have been introduced and established we don’t have to work through that anymore. It will be about finding out about them and I certainly think that something interesting going to happen with Alex and his transplant. I can’t’ be sure but I would say that that is going to make itself the story arch for series 5.

Misfits is known for its steamy sex scenes, did you find it challenging filming those parts?

Not particularly, I’ve done that a little bit before really in other jobs and me and Matt [Stokoe] are very good friends. We get on very well, we’re just friends really. We can have a laugh about it really, laugh about our bodies, the situation and everything. No one takes it too seriously and by the time we’ve done it about 15 times in every different camera angle, you don’t give a shit really, to be frank. I just want to eat my lunch so it doesn’t really feel like an issue for me. I hope it’s not a problem for him either!

What superpower do you wish you could have in real life?

I would like to be able to switch off my negative emotions as soon as I start to feel a bit angry or upset or jealous or bitter or anything like that, just switch it off and felt just fine. I think that would work on a practical level but I was thinking the other day – which related back to Simon’s character – I was watching The Hobbit yesterday and that bit with the ring, thinking it would be awesome to be invisible, I would love that.

Are you a fan of the science fiction and fantasy genre?

Yeah, I’m a huge fan. The guys got to go and do Comic-Con and I was so gutted that I couldn’t go. I’m an absolute fan of X-Men and Marvel, Spider-man, Spider-Woman. My idea of a perfect evening is getting a Chinese putting on something like Marvel and chilling out, I love it.

What would be your dream project?

I would like to play Storm in an X-Men Origins film. I’d like to do as many varied things as possible, I’d love to do a bit of theatre and film, a bit of social realism or do a bit of period drama. I’d really like to do that but that kind of journey I would like to take. Just varied and interesting work as possible really, with as many different characters as I can get my hands on really.

What other projects are you working on?

Straight after Misfits I went onto an ITV drama called Lightfields, it’s a ghost story set in three different time periods and I’m playing the daughter of the family in the Seventies which is great for me. I tend to end up playing these kind of sour, teenage, miserable people. It was really nice to play her because she is a bit lighter and she’s a bit like a twee Harriet the Spy kind of character which is nice and different.
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Thursday 20 December 2012

Gritty, Raw, Dirty, Sweaty, Sexy

"These streets demand your vigilance..."


If you had been driving down Con Colbert Road in Dublin this summer, or were a passenger on a train through Heuston Station, you would never have suspected that just a stone’s throw away, gruesome murders, arrests, and activities involving brothel madams, were taking place. But deep in the troughs of Clancy Barracks this summer lay Whitechapel residents, who were knee deep in corsets, petticoats and bodices; and that was just the men who frequented the brothel. For Clancy Barracks, once home to Ireland’s soldiers, was the residency of BBC drama Ripper Street for 19 weeks, where crew from the BBC, Dublin’s Element Pictures and the UK’s Tiger Aspect Productions and Lookout Point were set up. To stumble upon that cobbled location with its authentic 15th century stones, high stone walls and idle terraced houses was to step back into the solemn Victorian landscape of East London in the late 1880s - six months since the last Jack the Ripper killing, to be exact; to a haunted place slowly emerging into a fragile peace, hopeful that this killer’s reign of terror might at last have run its course. Nowhere is this truer than in the corridors of H Division - the police 'Precinct from Hell' charged with keeping order in the district of Whitechapel- now in a chaotic state following a tumultuous time for London and reported infamously worldwide. Its men hunted this maniac - and failed to find him. Ripper Street, a new eight part drama series, is their story.

H Division was responsible for policing a relatively small area of just 1¼ square miles, yet into that space were packed some 67,000 people: a seething, bustling mass of the poor and dispossessed. Between the factories, rookeries, chop shops and pubs that mark out this maelstrom moves Detective Inspector Edmund Reid (Matthew Macfadyen) – a forward thinking detective haunted by a tragic past mistake. Accompanied by the ever loyal local brawn of Detective Sergeant Bennett Drake (Jerome Flynn) and the mercurial brilliance of the US Army surgeon and one-time Pinkerton detective, Captain Homer Jackson (Adam Rothenberg), Reid seeks to bring justice to a world that is forever on the brink of mayhem.


Yet, Ripper Street is not another backward-looking 'Hunt the Ripper' story, but more a fictionalised trek into the heart of a London borough living in the blood soaked aftermath of that forever anonymous killer. It is an investigative journey into a world of bare-knuckle boxing, early pornography and copycat murders about the dedicated policemen for whom life – and crime – go on. "It’s not an area that was short of vicious murders and any woman found murdered with a knife in the consequent months was held up as a Ripper murder," explains director Tom Shankland. "So we’ll touch on Ripper in that way but not dig anybody up or change the canonical five." Indeed, this is not the comparatively polite Dickens-esq world of Victorian London, but an all together more visceral affair. "All the period depictions I’d seen of that particular crime story had almost been a bit too well behaved in a slightly slower way and shots have to be a bit wider to show off the nice furniture," he adds. "But if you can think of something awful [in Victorian London], it was happening."

By the late 1800s, London was the largest capital in the world and the centre of the ever-increasing British empire. Queen Victoria had been on the throne for over 50 years and the public face of Britain reflected Victoria’s lifestyle; proud, dignified and above all proper. It was the centre of empire, a centre of culture, a centre of finance, communication and transportation, with a new emerging mass media called the new journalism, later to be dubbed the tabloids. However, right on its doorstep in the East End lay the district of Whitechapel. "Seedy by any standards, it was a crime-ridden sordid quarter, where residents lived in abject poverty," states Ricky Cobb, courtesy of Jack the Ripper Tour. "It was an area of doss houses, sweatshops, abattoirs, overcrowded slums, pubs, a few shops and warehouses, leavened with a row or two of respectably kept cottages. It housed London’s worst slums and the poverty of its inhabitants was appalling. In fact, malnutrition and disease were so widespread that its inhabitants had about a 50/50 chance of living past the age of five years old."

"Whitechapel was a notoriously hard area to live in", confirms noted researcher, Neil Bell. "Situated just north of the London Docks, it was one of the first areas a newly landed immigrant would find themselves, wide-eyed and not knowing what was about to hit them." The area was the main immigrant district due in part to the large influx of Jewish, Irish and Russian. The potato famine had seen a large influx of Irish immigrants in the mid 1800′s along with the Jewish who arrived in thousands whilst fleeing persecution in Russia, Germany and Poland. In only a single decade, the Jewish population had risen to over 50,000. With so many different nationalities, they all had one thing in common: Every day was a struggle for survival. "Work was rare and in Whitechapel, men would literally fight each other with pickaxe handles for jobs," reveals Bell. "Alcohol was plentiful and cheap so Public Houses and Beer Shops dominated almost every street. With little else to do, men and women would sooner spend what little money they had on booze. The sanitary conditions and poor quality of the water supply meant that beer and gin were often the safest drinks around. Children were weaned on to it and it is with little wonder that alcoholism was rife."

At the same time, the West End of London was undergoing massive renovation and prosperity, opening up new concert halls, music halls, restaurants and hotels. "As the city expanded, cheap housing was now being demolished to make way for warehouses and business offices, which forced more people into smaller areas," says Cobb. "Overcrowding and a shortage of housing created the "Abyss of Whitechapel". For most of the population in the East End, one lived and died in the same neighborhood in which they were born. Hope was in short supply." For the poor and destitute, common lodging houses offered a bed for the night. Here you would be cramped into a small dormitory with up to 80 others and for 4 pence you could get a bed which was practically a coffin lying on the ground. "For tuppence you could lean against a rope, which was tied from one end of the wall to the other," notes Cobb. "Every night 8,500 men, women and children would seek shelter within these walls."

These doss houses lay just off the main roads of commercial streets. Areas such as Thrawl street, Flower and Dean and Dorset street (a street so bad the police wouldn’t go down unless they were in teams of four) were run by greedy landlords that had one motto: ‘No pay no stay.’ No money meant the night in doorways, lavatories or huddled up in the church park. For men, work could sometimes be obtained down by the docks, offloading ships or as market porters. For women, work was scarce and any work they could find paid very little to be able to survive, so out of sheer desperation many turned to the oldest profession in the world, prostitution.

"According to one account, the women of the East End at the time were so destitute that they would sell themselves for as little as three pence, or a stale loaf of bread," says Cobb. "In Oct 1888, the Metropolitan police estimated there were just over 1,200 prostitutes working the streets in Whitechapel alone. This was almost certainly an underestimate, for sheer want drove many more to occasional prostitution. This was their only means of income and survival. With the little money they earned, most would seek comfort in alcohol as the only refuge from reality. Drink was cheap and drunkenness rife, at any time of day or night, leading to brutality and violence as a direct result. Brawls were commonplace and, as one Whitechapel inhabitant put it, cries of 'Murder!' were nothing unusual in the street."

In short, it was a world in which Jack the Ripper would have no problem finding a victim. "These elements combined to make living in the area a combustible dog-eat-dog world. When you add to the Whitechapel mix the Bearer Uppers, the Bug Hunters, the Demanders, the Rollers, the Lurkers and any of the wonderfully named Villains, Criminals, Robbers, Pimps and Thugs, of which there were thousands, then you have an idea of the dark and desperate world the men of H Division worked in," says Bell, with almost unseemly relish.

Operating out of its Headquarters, based at the famous Scotland Yard, The Met force was broken down into 4 Districts – Northern, Eastern, Western and Southern. Within these Districts were jurisdictions known as Divisions and each Division was given its own letter of the Alphabet. Initially there were only 6 Divisions; however, by 1888 these had expanded to 22 — and if you were to become a Police Constable in 1888, one of the most notorious and feared Divisions to be posted to was that of H Division, Whitechapel. "The Division was headed by Superintendent Thomas Arnold and, as with every Division in the Met, it was split into two, Uniformed and The Criminal Investigation Department, or CID for short," states Bell. "The Uniformed men concentrated on the day to day policing of the area whereas CID undertook Detective work. The Uniformed side was led by acting Chief Inspector John West who reported directly to Superintendent Arnold."

It was into this world that your regular Police Constable walked his beat. A maze of entries, alleyways and courtyards were all lit by single gas lamps, giving out about 6 feet of light that at times were so thick, that you would struggle to see your own hand in front of your face. Sanitation was practically non-existent and people would throw their raw sewage into the street, making the stench of the whole district unbearable. Dressed neatly in his dark blue Melton uniform, with his Brunswick star glinting upon his helmet and his Collar number (ID) shining, the Bobby walked the the back streets, dark alleyways and filthy courts armed with regulation-issued truncheon for defense and his oil-fueled Bulls Eye lamp for light. Inside his collar he wore a leather stock which helped him survive the most common of attacks upon the Police, garrotting.

During the Jack the Ripper Murders of 1888, their numbers were bolstered by the temporary recruitment of uniformed Constables to their ranks, as well as the return of one of their most popular of Detectives, Frederick Abberline. "Abberline had been in H Division CID ever since his promotion to Local Detective Inspector in 1873 and he soon gained a reputation for being an excellent one," notes Bell. "Earning his stripes in the most difficult District in London enhanced his reputation, and by 1887 his superiors summoned him to work within Scotland Yard itself as part of the famous Central Office Detective Force."

However during the Ripper murders it was felt that the H Division needed someone with area experience to aid the new Local Detective Inspector Edmund Reid (who was a greatly reputed Detective himself) and to liaise with the freshly appointed Head of the Ripper case, Chief Inspector Donald Swanson of Scotland Yard. Swanson’s role was to be the Met Commissioner Sir Charles Warrens 'eyes and ears' on the case. Every piece of information pertaining to the murders went through him. Between Swanson, Abberline and Reid’s H Division, Scotland Yard and the Met had what they thought was a formidable Detective Department hunting the killer known as Jack the Ripper.

Though these men never managed to bring their notorious quarry to justice, it was not through any lack of trying. "It must be noted that forensics in 1888 was virtually non-existent," reasons Bell. "Fingerprinting was not used by the Met until 3 years later in 1891, and the best you could get from a blood test was to determine if it was mammalian or not. The best chance of a conviction was to either locate damning evidence on a person, a confession or capturing the murder in the act. To do this, the Met sent men out in various disguises in to Pubs to obtain gossip and to mill the streets with the homeless and unemployed just in hopes of picking up some information. They also wandered the dangerous streets at night, arresting anyone who acted suspicious. However, it was all in vain. By 1896, the Whitechapel Murderer, aka Jack the Ripper, had not been brought to task and the investigation wound down."

The central character in Ripper Street, Edmund Reid, is therefore based on a policeman at the heart of the Ripper investigations, but seemingly only in name. "He had already been a Pastry Cook and Ships Steward before joining the Met," adds Bell by way of putting more flesh on the bones. "Originally posted to nearby J Division in Bethnal Green, Reid took on Abberline’s role when the former moved to Scotland Yard just prior to the beginning of the Jack the Ripper murders in 1888. He was noted as 'one of the most remarkable men of the century' by the Newspaper The Weekly Dispatch when they wrote about him upon his retirement in 1896. Though an excellent Detective, Reid was also a most noted amateur Actor and Singer."

"He was a remarkable man," agrees Matthew Macfadyen, "but I didn’t base it on him. He was also a balloonist, and a druid, and 5 ft 6. I think he was actually the first man to jump out of a balloon with a parachute but I have to stress that I'm not doing that." The police would have felt incredibly modern at the time, thinks the former Spooks actor. "In many ways they were stumbling around a bit, before scientific advancement, fingerprints and forensics. Reid is a very dedicated, forward thinking policeman. What I find interesting about him is that there’s nothing jaded or on the back foot about him. I wanted to get away from the sort of classic, seen it all, done it all copper and he’s definitely not that. He’s quite progressive and interested in technology and the innovations of the age, which were enormous, especially in Victorian times. So he’s an interesting character. He’s got quite a lot of anger and he has a fairly dark past. He has made a terrible mistake and that sort of haunts him. So, there’s a lot to play with. It’s good fun."

Much of the fun of Ripper Street comes the central dynamic of its three world-weary protagonists. "I certainly love acting with those two and the way it’s written they complement each other very well," agrees Macfadyen. "There’s me, who’s the sort of driving force of the threesome; and then there’s Drake played by Jerome who’s got this lovely quality - he’s the brawn and he’s also got a great sincerity and strength to him; and then there’s Jackson played by Adam, who’s just sort of brilliant, he’s got a brilliant mind - I mean he’s wayward and he’s infuriating but he’s incredibly gifted at forensics and pathology and all the rest of it. As a threesome they sort of work really well. And there’s respect and there’s also mistrust. And there’s antagonism between the three of them so it’s a good mix. I hope!"

"Drake would do anything for Inspector Reid," adds Game of Thrones standout, Jerome Flynn. "He’s like his Colonel and he’s an example of a successful, strong, upright moralistic man. So I think he idolises him quite a lot and is extremely loyal to him. And then Jackson comes into the picture, he’s obviously been around a while but I don’t think Bennett Drake is at all pleased about that or about how keen Reid is to get Jackson in and to ask his advice and use his expertise." There is, he feels, a streak of personal jealously underneath. "There’s a certain American swagger about Jackson that Bennet Drake, I think, would like to have but wouldn’t admit that to himself," he says. "Jackson’s off drinking and whoring and not trapped by the system. Bennett, on the other hand, is trapped by the system and thinks that’s a good thing and the best way to be. And yet he’s wound up by Jackson. I think he sees in him a man he’d like to be, a part of him that has been locked up."

Drake has been locked up and buttoned down for seven or eight years H division srvice by the time we meet him. "And he had been in the army for quite a long time from his 20s, and served a lot and he’d been fighting in Sudan," adds Flynn. "I’ve got a feeling that Inspector Reid had some kind of influence on his life before he actually joined the police force. It is Reid who persuades him to come along. He’s a very loyal man and especially so to Reid." People have called his character a bit of a pit bull but Flynn sees him more as a refined muscle head. "He’s been institutionalised quite early on," he explains. "I think there was some kind of care home and then the army and then the police force so that’s his family. Essentially, he’s quite a lonely man, but I think he’s longing to have a life like his Inspector Reid. You know, to be happily married and have that couched around him because it’s something he’s never had." Above all else, Drake wishes to find a way to escape his thug status and the dehumanising memories he carries with him.

By contrast, American army surgeon Jackson has a thirst for vice in all its forms: women; booze; drugs; gambling. "He is a kind of a jack-of-all-trades and on the darker side of the spectrum," laughs Adam Rothenberg. "He doesn’t quite fit into the world of Whitechapel. He is a definite outsider in this world which is no small feat in this area of London at the time when almost everyone is a sort of outsider. Everyone is dangerous. Jackson is definitely not being up front with who he is." Rothenberg believes the biggest appeal of his character is that core enigma. "You’re very aware that you’re not filled in on his whole story and I think Jackson relishes that," he says. "I also think there’s probably an element of Jackson, where he’s not telling you the whole truth, probably because he’s not even aware of the whole truth. He’s very impulsive. He’s very wild and he’s a victim of his own internal drives. And I think that’s one of the fun things you get when you watch him because he’s not someone who makes decisions so much as he gets led around by forces inside him that most sane people don’t listen to." In that way he is a conduit for the outsider’s perspective on the world of Ripper Street. "I think through his eyes you get to see how peculiar a world it is," he agrees. "It’s almost as if someone from today would be if transplanted in to Victorian London. I think he’s very much a surrogate for the audience in a lot of ways. He is different from anyone the other characters have ever met."


Arriving with Jackson- and connected to him for mysterious reasons that MyAnna Buring is not revealing- is Long Susan. "Susan’s this well-spoken, obviously educated woman who is running a brothel," says Buring, before adding: "the best brothel in East London, I’ll have you know!" We don’t really know much about her past when we first meet her but there is a sense that perhaps she’s concealing something. "East London is notorious for attracting characters who want to harbour secrets and run away from some kind of a past," she reasons. "So obviously East London has served her well in that way. And she’s arrived here with Jackson, who she seems to have a sort of love/hate relationship with." Buring says she was really drawn to Long Susan because she was this incredibly strong independent woman who has forged a life for herself in which she is comparably autonomous to a lot of women of the time. "As opposed to being a two dimensional prop she’s a real character who has a real story arc throughout the series," she enthuses. "And I think that’s always really interesting to play. I think it’s much more interesting as an actor to play a character who you don’t immediately understand, that you peel the layers off."

A further piece in the puzzle is Rose Erskine; star-attraction at Long Susan's salubrious establishment on Tenter Street, who dreams of travels, riches and success on the stage. "I love her so much because she’s really feisty," says rising Irish star Charlene McKenna. "She’s really 'street' in that she really just says it like it is. On another level she is very manipulative and incredibly savvy. There’s a romantic side to her too. She’s a dreamer and a fantasist, she has so many layers. She’s just so much fun to play with." Longing to break free from the role for which life seems to have marked her out, McKenna states that it was decided from very early on that she would not simply be the 'tart with a heart'. "She has one but it’s not like she’s going to come good," she says. "She’s ambitious. She’s going to escape. She’s going to see to it that she gets out. She’ll do everything she can to make her dream for herself come true. I love all that. I love it. She’s just different. She’s multi-layered."

Finally there is Inspector Edmund Reid’s wife, Emily (Amanda Hale), once the happy spouse of a well-respected and ambitious young policeman, and a devoted mother to their beloved daughter. But her life has since changed dramatically. While she and her husband still love each other, their life together has been irretrievably altered by shared tragedy – the full details of which are not revealed. Reid carries a serious injury to his left shoulder that attests to this and only a very few know how he came by the wounds. None of them talk about it because what they see is a man fighting to find someone from his past – someone many believe to be a ghost. Both have different means of coping with this loss. Where Emily seeks solace in church and patronage for her charity efforts, Reid chooses only denial. Any time he allows himself away from work, he is to be found sitting attentive in the lecture halls of The Royal Academy or The Royal Institute; the knowledge he gains here aiding him in his investigations. Before this pain separated them, however, they were ideally suited. Emily’s intelligence and curiosity challenged and complemented Reid. Now, with an emotional gulf between them, Emily finds herself searching for new ways to channel her energies.

The first episode of Ripper Street, 'I Need Light', is especially gruesome and sordid, notes the Telegraph's Catherine Gee; whilst the Independent labels it "of a far more adult nature than might be expected with violence and a lot of sex and nudity." The action begins six months after the horrors, when the hysteria around them can still ignite mob mayhem. So when someone shouts, 'They've found a tart, inspector – she's been ripped,' a rabble descends on the alleyway crime scene and Inspector Reid has his work cut out preserving the evidence. Brutally murdered and with the hallmark signs of the Ripper upon her, one time H Division boss, Chief Inspector Abberline (Clive Russell), believes it Jack’s return, but Reid – now the precinct’s new master – suspects a different evil at work. Taking a more scientific approach to crime solving, Reid's new-fangled ideas are little understood by diehards such as his predecessor. There is also conflict with the fledgling press; particularly the Daily Star reporter Fred Best (David Dawson), who scrawls 'Down on Whores' in the alley to stir up further Ripper hysteria to flog papers (It is based on actual events that led to a man called John Pizer being falsely accused). When it turns out that the victim, Maud Thwaite (Sarah Gallagher), had been posing in naughty photographs after her middle-class husband fell on hard times, Reid and his assistants, Drake and Jackson, are slowly drawn into the burgeoning pornographic industry.

The second episode features Ernest Manby (David Coon), a 60-year-old toy maker, beaten to death for a mysterious brass box and the coins in his pocket. The Whitechapel Vigilance Committee presents a culprit in the form of 14-year-old Thomas Gower (Giacomo Mancini), who refuses to deny the charge. Reid – his conscience challenged by a radical lawyer called Eagles (Hugh O'Conor) and orphanage Governess Deborah Goren (Lucy Cohu) – tests the security of the case. Meanwhile, Jackson’s drinking and gambling have led to the loss of the pendant that ties him to his American past – a past that he and Long Susan fear will now be exposed. Ultimately, Reid and Drake find themselves besieged at Miss Goren’s orphanage by the rest of Gower’s vicious child gang and their brutal master, Carmichael (Joseph Gilgun). "[It's] fucking so ace, I can't even tell you, I've grown a moustache and everything," says Gilgun on his involvement in the show. "It's epic, it's grown over my lip and I can curl it. I look like Charles Bronson after a famine. It's a guest lead part so I'm bloody thrilled with it. It's just such a bloody great job."

Later episodes tackle child gangs, bare-knuckle boxing, a cholera outbreak, slum clearances and even terrorism. "Unlike other Jack the Ripper tales, which focus on the murderer himself, Ripper Street is based on the detectives tasked on tracking him down," says writer Richard Warlow. It was this unique take on the subject that proved a big selling point to get the BBC on board. "When we started development, it was this kind of an easy sell, Jack the Ripper helped sell the show, we weren’t interested in telling that story, we were interested in these characters who had gone through something and felt that they had failed massively and they had failed the community," he says. "Each episode is a different case, you go into a different world each week,” notes executive producer Will Gould . "The whole idea is that it’s a cop show, the metropolitan police was just over 50 years old, it’s about cops trying to keep order over chaos basically."

"Some episodes are very Jackson-centric, some are very Drake-centric, and Reid is all the way through, which is something we were very happy to do, to let characters step forward and take on an episode," says Warlow. "The ‘box’ is that it’s a cop show; each week there is a crime and they solve the crime; the big thing is all this fascinating stuff going on around the edges." This fascinating stuff, according to the writers, is Reid’s interest in all things technology. Because – and this is crucial to his belligerent breed of optimism – he has to believe a better day is coming. As such, the character has become both committed technophile and progressive atheist through a faith that the world – and its many despairs – will be healed by science and freedom from suspicion.

Gould elaborates: "The show is quite fascinated by technology, and Reid himself, I think he’s convinced that if tomorrow’s policing was here today then we would have got Jack. They were on the cusp of so many advances in policing, but he’s fascinated by all things technology. The first episode is all about very early cinema, with pictures that move. I think he’s got this kind of belief that it will all come together around the corner." Warlow elabortates: "We’ve been quite research heavy in making sure that in terms of what’s available, autopsies and forensic knowledge, is absolutely bang on, but we’ve pushed the limits, to a year or so. Finger printing was two or three years later so we can never do finger printing on the show, it’s really infuriating. There are lots of other things that you can gently push, but we’re pretty bang on in terms of what was scientifically available."

The actors themselves admit that before they signed on for their roles they weren’t too immersed in the Jack the Ripper story: "For me [I was only familiar] from TV and films really, the Michael Caine Ripper, I remember seeing on TV," says Macfadyen; "I was a big fan of Alan Moore’s film, which was a work of genius, but that’s about as familiar as I was with it," admits Rothenberg; "I didn’t know much except they never caught him," says Flynn.

Macfadyen says he was drawn to the project by the writing. "That’s what either grabs you or doesn’t," he thinks. "And Richard Warlow, the creator and writer, has made a very original thing really. He’s got a wonderful way of creating the language and so this show is sort of bombastic, big and colourful and grimy as well. There’s lots of stuff in there." The sets, he says, are also brilliant. "The designer, Mark Gerhaty, is really a supremely talented man and they’ve all been fantastic. I mean we were in this barracks built in the 1860s so it’s as it was. It’s like a big playground. We jumped around the different sets. There’s a toymakers shop, a pub, an orphanage and an asylum and all kinds of different things, it’s great. It’s really, really lovely."

"The sets are crucially important," agrees Flynn. "If you can walk into a set and feel the reality of it, then immediately you’re not having to work to bring yourself into the character. For me as an actor it’s about being able to believe the world I’m inhabiting in and the character that I’m inhabiting. And so the world they’ve created for Ripper Street in the sets is crucially important because I feel like I’m there. That’s the part of the work I can believe. I’m there because I can feel it. So the sets are crucially important to making that world real."

He says what excited him about the project was the richness of characters. "That made it stand apart from other police dramas," states Flynn. "And the richness of life at that time. It made it interesting. And fun as well and that swagger, like I say, that it has. It’s almost got a western feel to it. It’s not like everybody knows what they’re doing. There is a freedom of life at that time. There’s less control. Life is less controlled and that’s exciting. More and more as society has gone on, especially over here, everyone is more and more controlled and boxed up and you know what you’re doing and you know who the police are. And London at that time was very much out of control. The police hadn’t been there long. It was kind of almost a joke trying to bring law to those streets because it was a lawless place."

Rothenberg believes Ripper Street is fascinating because you’re invited to follow a thought process. "I think that the character of Reid especially can be seen as a real forerunner," he says. "I think that the science and technology these days form a matrix that we live in. We forget that there was a time when people got excited. Excited over the idea of like, dry cell batteries - that was a creative endeavour, you know. Science it could be said, was a new art form at the time. And fascinating, edgy, underground people were fascinated with things like ornithology and geology. The things that we think of as very dry today were actually infused with real passion back then. I think that’s a really nice thing to be reminded of. Ultimately for me the most exciting thing about Ripper Street is the quality of the scripts and the people involved. The subject material is fascinating but unless you had the quality behind it, it wouldn’t work. I mean the writing is brilliant. The actors are brilliant. I’ve never worked with people that are just so on top of what they do. So that’s a very exciting thing. To come into work every day and to know that no one is bored."

Buring reveals she was hooked because there’s a real edginess to the story. "Richard Warlow’s really discovered a really richly textured world," she says. "And above all I think he creates that with the characters he’s chosen to explore. So as opposed to just appealing to elements of the time, that we know anyway, we’re getting to know characters that are new to us. That hopefully it will be a real exciting journey for an audience to take with them." Also, says Buring, "they have essentially assembled the most incredible creative team to create the world of Ripper. Mark Geraghty our production designer is a genius. Every set, every location you go to is just so detailed. It’s so rich. As soon as we walked into Tenter Street, Mark brought this place to life. You know, walking into Jackson’s rooms, suddenly you got a real sense of the character. And he did what a great production designer does. He aids you as an actor because he gives you all these references to use and to work off. References that you wouldn’t necessarily have at your disposal but because they’re there you can use them. And it completely transports you into the world and the life of these characters."

And the final word as to why people should tune in to Ripper Street goes to Charlene McKenna... "It’s a period drama but it’s not stiff," she smiles. "It’s gritty and it’s raw and it’s dirty and it’s sweaty and it’s sexy." Enough said.
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Tuesday 18 December 2012

The Art Of Erotic Suggestion

I can never get a zipper to close. Maybe that stands for something, what do you think?

"Fuck! The gloves! Sexy or what?" Hayley Atwell is in the middle of a thoughtful disquisition on the nature of cinematic sexy — what to show, what not to show and what to do when you eventually choose to show. Atwell, it transpires, is a firm advocate of erotic suggestion rather than explicit display, and turns to Rita Hayworth in the 1946 classic Gilda for her template for movie raunch.

Of course, you would expect the 30-year-old actress and vivacious screen beauty to be something of a minx in real life. A highly intelligent one, of course, but a minx nonetheless. There's something about her sense of sexual power on screen that makes this charismatic actress riveting to watch as she unfurls her tantalising half-smile. If you want an alluring but complex heroine, all honeyed skin and chestnut-hair, almond-eyed Hayley is your woman.

Unsurprisingly, given her current chain of thought, Atwell thinks it is a good thing she didn't have a sex scene with Chris Evans in 'Captain America: The First Avenger'. The brunette beauty says she found it "refreshing" and "innocent" that her character Peggy Carter did not go all the way with the 30-year-old star's superhero alter-ego in the 1940s-based film because it was more appropriate. "I really liked it that there was no sex scene in the script because I thought, 'That was very refreshing and innocent and how traditional.' I think it was more in-keeping with the time. I've got a romantic notion that in the 40s there were classy ladies who had built up their relationships with men and subtle flirtation would go on for weeks before the final deal was sealed. And I think that's more exciting because you're not giving as much away. I wanted the audience to come away and think, 'I think that couple did actually really love each other.'"


Which is not to say she didn't feel it was her duty to have a "bit of a grope" when Evans revealed his rock hard chest for the first time. Filming a scene whereby Peggy Carter has to brush her hand across his nipple - Atwell explains she literally just had an impulse to touch it to make sure it was real. "And let me tell you, it was real and pert and covered in oil and it looked extraordinary in person," she giggles. "I just instinctively grabbed his man boob, and Joe loved it, he was like, do that again! They kept it in the film. So we did a couple of takes of me being really inappropriate with my hand on his pec for the duration of the scene just to see how far we could go, and then it got a little bit over the top." Atwell says she is actually attracted to physiques that seem to be appropriate to what that person does. "So if you’re an athlete or a dancer or swimmer, than amazing, but if you’re huge and beefy, for me it becomes a real off-putting vanity that I find unattractive," she insists. "It’s an energy thing really – it’s how comfortable people are in their bodies and how they carry it and I find that overrides any kind of physical thing really."

Being at ease in her own skin is not something that has always come naturally to Hayley. "My real self, the self I have always been from a child, is a loner and nerd, slightly overweight, with a very heavy fringe," she told the Guardian. "That is who I was as a kid. I don't think I will ever be anything other than that. It is sheer delight when I see pictures of myself now because I think: that's not me. I was 'Hayley Fatwell' at school. I had the only-child syndrome of loving my independence to the point of being a bit socially retarded. I was on only child, very quiet and very shy, I was surrounded in primary school by skinny girls in crop tops, when I had puppy fat. I wasn't cool. I developed really early and couldn't quite fit into girls' clothes and felt crap. I think that served me well – I had to develop different parts of my personality."

In the eager openness of her face, it is easy to find the little girl that Atwell once was. She was an only child whose parents were motivational speakers who had met and fallen in love at a London workshop of Dale Carnegie’s self-help bible How to Win Friends and Influence People in the mid-1970s. By the time she was two, they had separated. Her father, Grant – 'a Tom Selleck lookalike’, and a photographer-turned-shaman who also goes by his Native American name, Star Touches Earth – returned to America, leaving his daughter and her mother, Alison, living like sisters in their bohemian enclave off Ladbroke Grove in west London.

It was no ordinary childhood. Aged eight, after seeing Loyd Grossman put a live lobster into boiling water, Atwell became a committed vegetarian. Aged nine, she walked over hot coals at a 'Power Into Action’ workshop her mother had taken her to. As a teenager, while her friends were out experimenting with alcohol and cigarettes, she was on anti-vivisection and Free the Dolphins marches. At the rare parties that she did go to, she was happiest in the corner – preferably with someone’s parent – having a long discussion about life, love and the universe.

At Sion-Manning, her comprehensive secondary school, Atwell rebelled against rebellion, taking the bookish route and excelling academically. It was not always easy, and she often found herself being bullied by fellow students for her New Age ways. 'I’d see kids fighting in the playground and say things like, "I’m sensing a lot of anger here",’ she laughs. After her GCSEs she moved to the fee-paying London Oratory, and then on to Guildhall, a happy outcome for the girl who had only ever wanted to be an actress.

Named after Hayley Mills, Atwell was exposed to film and theatre from a young age. "Mum wasn’t at all religious but she thought that going to the theatre was as important a ceremonial, communal experience that a person could have," she says. "She was always very moved by the power that it had to open your mind. I found it genuinely thrilling." A trip, aged 11, to see Ralph Fiennes – with whom she would later work on The Duchess – playing Hamlet was a particularly formative moment. A shy child, Atwell found that the only time she wasn’t terrified of speaking was when she was saying somebody else’s words, reading aloud in class or performing in a play. "From a very young age, stories fuelled my imagination in the most wonderful way," she says. She remembers spending many hours alone in her room recreating her favourite fairy stories. "Sometimes I would steal characters’ names from other stories and put them into mine. I felt very safe and very happy in those little worlds of my own."

She recognises that the woman she has grown into is a product of the child who could navigate any social situations she found herself in by putting on a mask. "When I was with my mother’s friends, I could talk fluently about Descartes. When I was with my father, I could do the New Age thing and immerse myself in ceremonies for dead spirits I had never met. When I was with my posh friends, I could be posh. When I was with my rougher friends, I could be totally street."

"Hayley is a real chameleon," says Saul Dibb, who cast her in her first television role as Catherine Fedden, the bipolar daughter of a corrupt Tory MP in the BBC adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Line of Beauty. "She can adapt to any situation with the most extraordinary ease. She is also a strong character who has the added bonus of being one of those magnetic characters that people just want to be near." Playing a manic-depressive who makes a habit of asking the socially unaskable questions, she managed to shock even that irrepressibly racy screenwriter Andrew Davies with her own direct approach. "He came on set and asked us if we had any questions about his script, so I asked if Catherine had ever had an orgasm, and I think it threw him – I'm a bit straight up," she laughs.

So impressed was Woody Allen by her performance as Catherine that he made her his new muse in his 2007 film Cassandra's Dream alongside Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell and gushed to the press about her beauty. "I wish I felt like his muse but I hardly felt he ever talked to me", comments Atwell, adding that when they did speak, his advice was minimal – her description of his working method shedding some light on the strangely anonymous nature of Allen's late-career output. "I'd say 'what am I doing here? Who is this girl?' and Woody was like 'Oh, you know, she's just a girl…' and I'd go 'right… OK'. It was an odd time, I was incredibly grateful for the experience and the doors that it opened to me and meeting someone like Woody. But I felt very rabbit-in-the-headlights."

Yet from that moment her career has taken on an unstoppable momentum. As a bewitching Julia Flyte in the Julian Jarrold's big-screen version of Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh’s classic novel of class friction and forbidden love in interwar Britain, she had to compete with people's cherished memories of the multi-award-winning 1981 TV version. "I didn't watch the TV version as I didn't want to appear to be imitating anyone, but a man came over to me in a pub [during filming] and said I reminded him of his friend, Diana Quick, even though he didn't know what I did for a living," says Atwell. Evidently made for the role, the Londoner readily admits that "the director said I wasn't an immediate choice for Julia. It was partly because I really went for it in the audition and slapped Matthew [Goode, who plays Julia's lover Charles Ryder] really hard. The shock created that little bit of frisson between us that got me the part."

Atwell thinks the fact she, herself, went to church and attended a Catholic school growing up gives her "a sense of the Catholic guilt that's ingrained, especially within Julia at that time." Entering a bygone of waistcoats, white linen suits, and sybaritic afternoons spent punting at Oxford, she states, "I think the easiest thing for me was, I was walking into Castle Howard, which was being Brideshead, and also the clothes and the - even the hair. Everything was very grand, but also quite oppressive, quite daunting, very haunting. And so it was - it was just up to me to breathe into that world, and to inhabit that world." Breathing can be quite restricted when your generously proportioned breasts are oppressed by the tyranny of a 20s fashion which did not celebrate women's curves at all. "We had to tape down my bosom for Brideshead," she says with a wince, before announcing she loves the womanly curves she acquired at 17, when doctors advised her to put on weight to be fit enough to play her beloved full-contact rugby. "I felt imprisoned in those difficult costumes. It was the complete opposite, of course, for The Duchess," she grins.

Ah, Atwell and Keira Knightley sharing a Regency bed with Ralph Fiennes in the film adaptation of Amanda Foreman's biography of Princess Diana's 18th-century ancestor; the witty and attractive but hopelessly naive aristocrat, Georgiana Spencer. Set up and then trapped in an emotionally-distant, arranged marriage with callous but regal and powerful Duke of Devonshire William Cavendish, Hayley plays the duchess's best friend, a skilful power broker with mixed motives in a ménage à trois. She is also the duchess's sexual awakener in a scene that suggests a Sapphic attraction between the two. "I wouldn't be surprised if they had a lesbian relationship," says Hayley, "but we wanted to be delicate enough with it to just show an aspect of their relationship that wasn’t sexual. This was a time when homosexuals didn’t have a label, and I think marriage then – especially in the aristocracy – was based on more of a business deal than it was on love and passion. So, you were able to have your love affairs elsewhere, with women teaching women how to enjoy themselves and their bodies, sexually. It [the scene] was something that showed how beautiful their relationship was. But you could also say that it was partly Bess having a sexual power over Georgiana as well as other forms of power."

As for the Pavlovian comparisons with Keira, the hype-wary Hayley dismisses them in her direct way. "Keira and I are very different actors and very different human beings," she says. "She has this childlike, girly quality but also the incredibly tough skin of someone who has had an awful lot of press, whereas I can be quite geeky." It was, though, fascinating to be around her and to watch her work ethic, and how professional she is, thinks Atwell. "We spent a bit of time living together at a country house, and had hot country dinners together. And we were able to just get on as two young girls in their early 20s, and just hang out. And that was great, because that helped relieve some of the tension that was going on within the story, of what we were doing."

Next up were two Channel 4 adaptations of novels: William Boyd's Any Human Heart and Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth. She is the love interest in each – though the characters are centuries apart. In The Pillars of the Earth, a quasi-religious 12th-century epic, she plays the dispossessed Aliena, determined to reclaim her father’s Earldom for her brother. Her father is arrested and hanged for treason, leaving her penniless. She’s then raped by William Hamleigh and his groom once they find out where she and her brother are hiding. But even though she struggles with the psychological aftermath, she never rests from pursuing her goal of restoring her brother to her father’s title. In five months, filming in Budapest, she had to see Aliena through 20 years from "princess to peasant to wool merchant to love interest to wife and mother". It was a "stretching exercise", she says, in which she had to "grow at speed".

Any Human Heart is epic too, though confined to the 20th century. Boyd described it as an "emotional, dramatic and rackety journey" through the "long and tumultuous life" of a writer, Logan Mountstuart. Hayley plays Freya, his second wife and the love of his life. "But he was the problem," she says. "Logan Mountstuart is a pathetic womaniser. How could I justify that? I needed Freya not to look like an idiot for going out with the wrong kind of man." That said, Hayley is unashamedly a man's woman. "I absolutely adore the company of men. I'd rather spend a weekend with guys than with girls – I'm more masculine that way," she admits. "Hayley is a star in the old-fashioned sense of the word,’ says author Boyd, "whose bombshell 1940s glamour is mesmerising."

Discussing the comparisons with old time movie stars, she nods: "Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's the square jaw. Stars in the old days used to be more angular. I think my face works on screen because there's a lot of angles to it." Atwell, as we have discovered, has been playing period beauties fairly solidly since graduating from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. As well as Aliana, Freya, Julia, Bess and Peggy there was Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park and The Ruby in the Smoke's Rosa Garland. "Please God, no more red lipstick!" Hayley says, dropping her head into her hands in mock despair. When she looks up again, the beautiful mouth that is the source of so much frustration has split her face into a dimply grin. It is easy to see why it has generated so much attention; it is a megawatt sort of a mouth. Lauren Bacall had one, Hedy Lamarr had one, Cate Blanchett has one.

In her relatively short career, she has played her hand well; choosing the interesting roles and, most crucially, making the most of her porcelain good looks without ever cashing in on them. Much has been made of her voluptuous sensuality, and yet Atwell has never gratuitously revealed an inch of flesh. "In Cassandra's Dream I had a love scene with Ewan, so I said to myself, "I'm going to take myself seriously and wear a body stocking out of respect for Ewan's wife," she explains, "because my body was not going to be seen. And I wore control pants in Brideshead for the love scene with Matthew. Oh," she adds teasingly with – yes – a minxy grin, "I'm giving away all my secrets!" Well, maybe not all. In The Pillars of the Earth, for example, there was also the judicious employment of some rather anachronistic nipple pasties and a Middle Ages body-double for that nude pond swim; such are the technical logistics of the art of erotic suggestion. In terms of actresses working today, there can be no curvier body that promises so much but explicitly delivers so little.

Despite employing every trick of the trade, Atwell insists nude scenes can still be very liberating. "I feel very human," she says. "This is me, with all my little imperfections." If anything she seems even more acutely aware of others' feelings while filming sex scenes, rather than her own. She is, for example, protective for the wives and girlfriends of the actors with whom she is simulating love-making. "It's people's worst fantasy to see their partner kissing someone else, even though it's a job and it's not real," she says. "Often I also get very protective of the guys I'm with, especially if you feel there's an insecurity there… they've really been working out or you know they've only agreed to show a left bum cheek or something."

Perhaps that is why Atwell insists Ray Winstone is the "sexiest" leading man she's ever starred alongside despite his wearing baggy, yellow underpants and offering more than a hint of a paunch. The brunette beauty shares the screen with Ray in her latest movie The Sweeney, Nick Love's big-screen remake of the cult 1970s TV series, and says: "One thing I love about Ray is he's so charismatic and full of charm. I play a flying officer who is having an affair with his character. Out of all my leading men he's definitely the sexiest. He's got these animalistic, primal, and alpha male qualities about him. You can tell he's got such a strong family bond, they mean everything to him and that is very attractive. Someone who can take care of his own. He's like a lion, so I really enjoyed being around him. He's one of the good guys."

The makers of the movie clearly think he has the Sex-Factor too: why else would they pair him with an extremely captivating woman young enough to be his daughter? "If people think I’m a sex symbol, then fine," says Winstone, who is reprising the role first played by John Thaw in ITV’s original version almost 40 years ago. "In fact it’s more than that — it’s fantastic! I’m a fat 55-year-old, so how do you expect me to feel at being cast as a bloke who has a girlfriend 25 years his junior? Importantly, though, I think it is plausible. It illustrates — quite rightly, in my opinion — that women don’t just go for young slim guys with six-packs. I’m old fashioned enough to believe that what women find attractive is being treated well, and Jack Regan does treat the woman in his life well and looks after her. You have to be a bit of a rogue, as well, I think, but you have to be a gentleman and a protector. That’s maybe what turns women on, although, of course, you’d need to ask a woman for some kind of confirmation of that."

At which point co-star Atwell piped in: "Charisma, presence, good manners, and a great sense of humour goes a long way, certainly more than six pack abs. I find men that can carry themselves with confidence are far more attractive. It’s not based on trying to impress anyone or insecurity, or trying to be something you’re not." Winstone admits he had a few qualms about playing a man enjoying a passionate affair with a woman a quarter of a century his junior. "Originally I thought it might be better if Regan had a girlfriend who was in her 40s," he says. "I’ve got daughters of 30 and 26 and there was slight discomfort at the thought of kissing someone of their age. But Hayley was fine about it — she saw no problem with the idea of our characters having a relationship, so we went with it." The pair do more than kiss, of course.

Although she says she finds those particular scenes too embarrassing to watch, Atwell thinks Winstone's "gentlemanly" nature made things "a lot less awkward". "Filming the sex scenes was in reality fun and silly," she adds. "It looks a lot more brutal than it was and being thrown up against a public toilet adds a little bit more danger to it," before admitting she had warned her parents the film might not be for them. More than anything Atwell generally finds filming such scenes to be "funny"; admitting it can also be "weird" being naked in front of a male production team who seem to be "enjoying it". She added: "Sex scenes are so funny to shoot, you are naked in them and both wearing nappies or covers. It's often a bit cold on set and you're in a warehouse or a studio and you're surrounded by guys who feel very uncomfortable and they are all trying to be respectful but they seem to be enjoying it at the same time. So there is a lot of weird stuff going on."

Returning finally to her chosen theme, Atwell reiterates: "I’ve always been a big believer in what you don’t see being much sexier than what you do see," she says. "Do you know what? I don’t think I’m curvaceous. It’s simply that most other actresses are really, stupidly tiny. When I meet some of them, I can’t believe it. I know I’ve got curves and big boobs and I’m never, ever going to complain about that. Plus I love how expressive my body is. The other day, I was looking back over footage of Any Human Heart, which was made before I started training for Captain America, and I looked at myself as Freya and thought, 'I like her and I believe in her. And I really believe that she loves Logan.' And there’s nothing sexier than that, is there?"
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Monday 17 December 2012

Copping A Squiz At Underbelly's New Ladies

Underbelly: Squizzy is set to sizzle on the screen next year, with the main character of this season of the crime franchise having four women battling for his affections. The Channel 9 series focuses on the life of Joseph Theodore Leslie "Squizzy" Taylor (Jared Daperis) and sees female protagonists Dolly Grey (Camille Keenan), Lorna Kelly (Elise Jansen) and Ida Pender (Gracie Gilbert) all chasing the criminal mastermind. Even the wife of one of his colleagues in crime, Annie Stokes (Diana Glenn), secretly has the hots for him and the pair end up having a tryst. Squizzy's first love was Grey, who was a prostitute when Squizzy met her. He dumped her for Kelly, whom he married. While married he had an affair with Pender. He then left Kelly and married Pender.

The actors who get to romance Squizzy on screen said despite his character's roguish reputation, Daperis, 22, who plays the part, was nothing short of a gentleman. Gracie Gilbert, 20, who plays teen tearaway Pender, said: "It helps when you have an actor working opposite you who is lovely and very charming and makes things easier." Her character meets Squizzy when she is working at a hosiery counter where he buys stockings for his wife. Of the pair's love scenes Gilbert said: "There is nudity but the relationship that Squizzy and Ida have is so passionate. It's not gratuitous. It's always the thought at the back of your mind about your mum and dad watching it and your nanna." Gilbert said she drew inspiration for the intensity of the relationship from her first teen romance. "It was all very exciting and new and we were both young and awkward," she said. "I was with him for quite a long time. He was my next-door neighbour."


Jansen plays Squizzy's wife and when the pair meet Kelly is a virgin, a staunch Christian and a member of the Temperance society, which is against smoking and drinking. Jansen said the challenge was portraying the innocence of her character. She said she also drew on intimacy lessons she had while learning her craft at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts. "For me it was a bit different to the other female characters because of who she was," Jansen said. "She was a Christian and wasn't sexually promiscuous."
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Sunday 16 December 2012

The Year Of Big Bother

Data released by Ofcom has shown that Big Brother was the most complained about TV programme of 2012. The Channel Five show attracted 2,088 complaints, making it the most controversial programme of the year. More than half of these (1,139) were about contestant Conor McIntyre’s threatening remarks against fellow housemate, Deana Uppal. At one point he told other contestants he would "punch her in the face, just to knock her out" and also claimed he would sexually assault her with an epilator. In November, Ofcom ruled that Channel 5 had breached the Broadcasting Code by showing footage of McIntyre’s threatening language and behaviour.

The X Factor Results show attracted 1,488 complaints, making it the second most complained about television programme. The vast majority of these centred on the controversial exit of singer Carolynne Poole, after a producer was seen whispering in judge Louis Walsh’s ear. Viewers accused the ITV1 show’s producers of fixing the result, as Walsh initially appeared to save singer Poole before backing controversial contestant Ryan Clark. Ofcom did not uphold the audience's complaints.


In third place, attracting 811 complaints, was ITV's This Morning. During a live interview, presenter Phillip Schofield confronted the Prime Minister, David Cameron, with a list of alleged paedophiles associated with the Conservative party. ITV later had to pay £125,000 in damages and costs to Lord McAlpine, as an ‘unfortunate camera angle’ meant that his name was visible to viewers. Schofield was also disciplined by ITV. Ofcom have said that they are still investigating the incident.

Top 10 complained about shows to Ofcom (up to December 12)

1. Big Brother (2,088)

2. The X Factor Results (1,488)

3. This Morning (811)

4. True Stories: Gypsy Blood (509)

5. Live: The Silent Ascent (378)

6. Sky News (364)

7. The X Factor (305)

8. Islam: The Untold Story (293)

9. Citizen Khan (256)

10. Keith Lemon's LemonAid (246)

Total complaints across the year: 16,666

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Saturday 15 December 2012

The Making Of A Lady

"I don't like the girl and I'm not going to marry her!" huffs Lord Walderhurst, puffing his privileged cheeks and dismissing another crestfallen flibbertigibbet with a swish of his widower's handkerchief. Aunt Maria is aghast. "Who cares which girl you marry," she snaps, bustle crackling with indignation. "You are an unattached marquess. It is your duty to marry again and get an heir!" So begins the Making of a Lady, which comes to our screens this Sunday as an adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s unorthodox romance The Making of a Marchioness and its sequel The Methods of Lady Walderhurst (both 1901).

In this one-off special, Lydia Wilson stars as our heroine, wispy and genteel Emily Fox-Seton, a well educated but penniless woman who grew up hoping she would marry for love, but has come to realise that her priority must be survival. Fine featured but at pains never to look pretty or attract attention, Emily works for Lady Maria Byrne (Joanna Lumley), a domineering, acerbic older woman who lives in a very smart house on the other side of town. During her daily duties as a lady’s companion, Emily comes into contact with her employer’s wealthy widower nephew, Lord James Walderhurst (Linus Roache). Weary of Lady Maria’s relentless match making, Walderhurst cuts a rather distant figure, but he treats Emily with a great deal more respect and kindness than his aunt.

When Walderhurst realises that a favour he asked of her has lost Emily her position he is mortified. It occurs to him that the two of them could come to a practical if unromantic agreement – marriage. He admires the fact she is dedicated and hard-working and appreciates her undemanding nature which he imagines would not impact too much on the life he has chosen. He realises that he can offer her a secure home and a true independence born out of his wealth. He and Emily aren’t in love, but he clearly hopes that one day affection may blossom. Emily is shocked and sad to give up her hopes of marrying for love but without other means of support her situation is such that she has little option and she finds herself accepting.


Like the book, the drama begins as a Victorian fairytale, duping us into a false sense of familiarity. There are costumes. There is a stately country house. There is a grapefruit-faced housekeeper and a butler who looks like the wrong answer in a game of Guess Who? There are overly accented scullery maids a-titterin' an' a-gossipin' under marshmallowy bonnets. There is a string-heavy score that becomes aroused at times of narrative stress and positively tumescent at the sight of a poorly secured cravat. There is sexual repression and an over-buffed blunderbuss. Life in the marital mansion passes in a series of stifled yawns and half-hearted gropes by gaslight. There are dinner table longuers and lingering shots of Emily looking pained at a writing desk. It's all unervingly reminiscent of one of those Catherine Cookson miniseries in which some rustic mimsy in a Great Uncle Bulgaria shawl blithers on about "duty" and "a woman's place" before banging a blacksmith on a tor. It's not exactly a bouncing jalopy of woo-hoo, notes Sarah Dempster.

Until this point, our full attention rests on the demure petty concerns of social rivalry, but things become more complicated when Emily befriends Walderhurst’s wildly handsome young relative Alec Osborne (James d’Arcy) and his exotic Indian wife (Hasina Haque), who turn out to be very dark characters. They seem very much in love, which is the converse of Emily and Walderhurst’s still unformed relationship, and Emily is fascinated by their passion. Significantly, Walderhurst intensely dislikes his nephew and his frequent requests for money. Osborn is Walderhurst’s sole heir as long as he and Emily remain childless and Emily realises belatedly that Walderhurst’s sudden proposal was hastened by the family’s concerns about Alec’s marriage to Hester.

When Walderhust joins his regiment in India, Emily is left alone, unaware of the bitter dangers and social implications that came with defending a huge fortune. Things start to Happen. There is malaria and an imperilled dray horse. Joanna Lumley glides on, realises she's too likable to convince as a bitchy matriarch, and glides off again. The suspense mounts. There is an abandoned cottage and the line "There's going to be a storm", followed by a storm. And there is, unfortunately, an elderly Indian servant, Ameerah, whose every appearance is accompanied by a "mysterious" Indian flute motif, presumably to ensure we don't suddenly mistake her for a strippergram or member of Union J. Cue an uncomfortable "beware the exotics" subtext which, when combined with references to unpleasant rumblings in the colonies, threatens to turn the whole thing into It Ain't Half Hot Ma'am. But never mind. The past is a foreign country; they do things racistly there.

Screenwriter Katie Brooke explains: "Emily Fox-Seton and Lord Walderhurst marry each other for the wrong reasons. It is a business arrangement, not a love match, although they both feel more for each other than they let on. They are insecure in their relationship and this is a weakness to be exploited. Enter two wonderful villains, Alec and Hester Osborn. On one level they have what Emily and Walderhurst don’t have: unbounded confidence in each others’ love, and outspoken passion for each other. But they don’t have one thing: money. As Walderhurst’s heir, Alec decides it is time to step into his cousin’s shoes."

Ultimately, Burnett asks, must fame and fortune come at the expense of the purity and kindness that our heroine embodies? As the big hand creeps towards denouement o'clock, you start to realise that not only is what you think couldn't possibly happen because it's too silly happening, it is happening with a face so straight it's almost heroic. All of which makes for an unapologetically old-fashioned, beautifully shot, thunderingly unsubtle melodrama that falls somewhere between diverting twaddle and humourless hoopla. Etiquette decrees that we call it Frownton Abbey before apologising profusely and leaving in the nearest barouche.

The Making of a Lady represents a resurrection of the author’s now little-known adult fiction, so frequently overshadowed by the cosy works of Victorian moralism- The Secret Garden- for which she has become synonymous. Getting this story onto the screen has been something of a personal journey for executive producer Stevie Lee, the driving force behind the novel’s revivification. After a new edition of the book was put out by Persephone, the publishers of neglected fiction, Lee was given it to read by a friend while she was undergoing chemotherapy in hospital. "It was a fantastically good distracting read," she says. "It’s so rare to find a story where you genuinely don’t know what’s going to happen next. At base it is a tale about money and greed. It’s just gripping, and I loved it from the heart."

Director Richard Curson Smith says what he particularly likes about the story is the way it gradually shape-shifts. "It’s not a Wilkie Collins gothic horror, or a romance," he explains. "The strange smashing together of these two worlds is what creates the tension, the dread." The drama was filmed on a modest budget of £1.2 million in just four weeks. Filming took the production to three stately homes; including Jacobean Cheshire mansion Dorfold Hall, which represents the Walderhurst’s country pile. It comes as no surprise when d’Arcy – fresh from filming lavish Hollywood blockbuster Cloud Atlas with Tom Hanks, and a Hitchcock biopic with Antony Hopkins – reveals that there has been something of a "Dunkirk spirit" on the set.

According to Curson Smith, though, managing the tight budget has been nothing compared to the challenge of blending costume drama and psychological horror. He calls his hybrid "a cross between Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, and Rosemary’s Baby". How did he achieve it? With careful manipulation of the camera so that, as in the novel, we only see the world through Emily’s eyes and "never quite know what’s real and what she’s imagining. It is about a girl being immersed in a world she doesn’t understand, and we go on that journey with her."

The fact that two plot threads, one a romance, the other a thriller, are woven together through the film, resulted in the creation of a strange dichotomy on set. D’Arcy channelled childhood trauma to get inside the head of villainous Alec, whom he describes as "a sick puppy… but quite good at badminton". In the other camp, Roache says playing the part of Victorian gentleman Walderhurst had been "delicate, like fine lace work". He says he accepted the job because he loved the romance. "For me, it’s about two people who are getting married for different pragmatic reasons," he says. "It’s so unusual, so human, and so delicately written."

When interviewed by the Telegraph earlier in the year, Roache had just finished filming the "awkward" first lovemaking scene with Lydia Wilson, which both actors think is a pivotal moment for their characters. "Women have changed their relationship to their bodies since then," says Wilson, who spoke to a movement coach to help her create Emily. "She encouraged me to think about Emily’s sexuality as this absolute mystery to her. All her movement flows out of her guardedness. When she does have sex with her new husband, it’s this huge game-changing thing."

Both Wilson and Curson Smith agree that Emily, Burnett’s rather pale heroine, may be the reason the story dropped out of fashion. "Jane Austen’s heroines are witty and concerned with image," thinks Wilson. "Emily doesn’t have any of the commodities that make someone successful in the modern world. She’s not exactly a little sex bomb [in the book]. She’s more like a lovely kind cow with big eyes." In this respect, at least, she is the antithesis of Wilson herself. The 28-year-old, who studied at Queens' College, sleepily padded into the consciousness of the television watching world as William Boyd's Monday, the tousled teen temptress with a penchant for nude fridge raids, in the 2010 adaption of Any Human Heart. It turned out her character was 16 and had run away from home on the West Coast to live in Greenwich Village and jump on the beatnik bandwagon. "My mum's from Greenwich Village and grew up at the same time, so it was a delicious part to research," says Wilson. "She told me about living in this almost childlike state of bohemianism, walking around the house naked."

Raised in Queen’s Park, in Kilburn, north-west London by her advertising exec father and American mum (an ex-model turned philosophy teacher), Wilson decided she wanted to be an actress at the age of five. "I still wonder why – and it lay dormant for a long time because I was a quiet kid." Eventually she secured a minor role in the highly-regarded adaptation of Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel about human clones bred to be organ donors. "I have one line," she giggles of her scene as an ill-fated replica being looked after by Carey Mulligan on her deathbed. 'Dude, I’ve got one eye and no stomach! It’s funny because they say act with your gut or, on film, use your eyes, and I have neither! Carey sniffed out straight away that it was my first job – she was super-cool. I guess it’s kind of funny to die as your first job, it’s like a fucked-up kind of birth."

As a Cambridge English graduate Wilson says she "wolfed down' Burnett’s novel before tackling arguably the biggest role of career. She wanted to be as faithful as possible to Burnett’s Emily. Although the script has admittedly taken some licence with her character, the production has at least been faithful to Burnett’s writing in at least one vital arena: the wardrobe. The author, said to have been disappointed with her first husband, once complained to her friend, "he does not know the vital importance of the difference between white satin and tulle, and cream-coloured brocade'. In the books, her descriptions of clothes, sometimes pages long, are bordering on the fetishistic. So it seems only right that Wilson should have had a staggering 42 costume changes for 100 minutes of drama. She talks extensively about her "top 10 outfits" including "a cream suit that has a gorgeous little cravat around her neck, a huge hat, and a garnet-coloured rope that does it up at the front…" So, ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourself for a new entry in a distinctive genre, the obsessively detailed costume horror.
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Friday 14 December 2012

The Sopranos Of Sex And Shopping

"You've been creating quite a stir, haven't you?"

A group of women and men dressed in turn-of-20th century outfits are standing inside a carpet warehouse in Northwest London. They talk to each other while standing - waiting for a signal - in a fake marble-floor hall that looks very much like an old, high-end shopping store. A big staircase leads down to a floor full of hats for women, top hats for men, handkerchiefs, gloves, umbrellas, walking sticks and perfumes and many other goodies on offer. And on a table, books from a famous author are stacked up - ready to be signed. Suddenly another group of people in shorts and T shirts shout instructions. A minute later everyone is ready. And action! One of the men in early 20th century garb is introduced as the famous author, whose books are being sold, but whose identity is kept secret for now. The other, wearing one of the smartest early 1900s suits in the room, turns out to be Harry Gordon Selfridge, founder of London's famous Selfridges Department Store. Someone misses a line, and the production staff in shorts returns. The TV shoot takes a small break...


Hot on the heels of Downton Abbey, 2013 sees the arrival of a new period drama on ITV. Set in Selfridges department store at the start of the 20th Century, the new biopic captures a time of decadence, female empowerment and shopping. Sound familiar? That’s because it is reports the Radio Times. Cast your mind back a couple of months and you’ll recall the BBC introducing us to a similar format with The Paradise, a northern equivalent following the fictional progress of the first British department store under the entrepreneurial eye of John Moray.


When ITV originally announced plans to dramatise the story of Harry Gordon Selfridge, the flamboyant founder of the Oxford Street retail emporium, it seemed to have an autumn ratings winner on its hands. But that was before the BBC stole a march on its rival. Furious ITV executives were given little choice but to push back the launch of their series, Mr Selfridge. Publicly, the broadcaster says it had not set a transmission date and would not be drawn into a row over scheduling. Privately, there has been muttering about dirty tricks – not least because the BBC, humbled by its trouncing in the ratings when it pitched its new version of Upstairs Downstairs against ITV’s Downton Abbey, rushed out its drama before filming had even been completed. For its part, the BBC insists that its series – written by Bill Gallagher, who wrote the recent adaptation of Lark Rise to Candleford – was commissioned first and that all resemblances to ITV’s offering are coincidental. Yes, The Paradise is based on an Emile Zola novel (Au Bonheur des Dames) and set in 1875, four decades before Harry Selfridge’s adventures in retailing. But the similarities are striking, nevertheless.

The Paradise starred Emun Elliott as a handsome, moustachioed businessman with a reckless streak, an ability to make women swoon at his feet, and a dream: to build a gleaming department store that will revolutionise the way people shop. Mr Selfridge stars Jeremy Piven as a handsome, moustachioed businessman with a reckless streak and… you get the picture. The Entourage actor takes the title role as the maverick American businessman who founded the landmark Oxford Street store in 1909. After shipping his wife Rose (Frances O’Connor) and children over to British shores while he runs his store, Harry crosses paths with glamorous stage entertainer Ellen Love (Zoe Tapper) whose alluring looks make her the chosen face of Selfridges.



While The Paradise began with the arrival in the big city of Denise Lovett (Joanna Vanderham), a young and ambitious country girl who is lucky enough to land a job at the newly opened store, viewers on ITV will follow the fortunes of Agnes Towler (Aisling Loftus), a "spirited working-class shop girl who gets a lucky break to work in the accessories department at Selfridges". While the Paradise had a female boss who was a stickler for discipline (Sarah Lancashire as Miss Audrey), Selfridges has confident head of accessories Miss Mardle (Amanda Abbington). Each drama has gorgeous costumes, behind-the-scenes intrigue and love interests aplenty.

The main difference is tone: though its producer, Simon Lewis, described The Paradise as "sort of Sex and the City in the 19th century", the north-east of England setting and gloomy production make it seem like a Catherine Cookson adaptation. Mr Selfridge is more fun-filled – unsurprising, as it is scripted by Andrew Davies, king of the rollicking costume drama and the man who put Colin Firth’s Mr Darcy in that see-through white shirt. Set in a similar period to the original series of Downton, Mr Selfridge focuses on the racier side of Edwardian life, Davies promises as much nudity "as you can get within the limits of prime-time viewing" in his stated quest to make "shopping as thrilling as sex."

To that end, ITV has thrown the cheque book at Mr Selfridge, painstakingly recreating in minute detail the story of the American 'showman of shopping'. Pioneering and reckless, with an almost manic energy, he created a theatre of retail where any topic or trend that was new, exciting, entertaining - or sometimes just eccentric - was showcased. Making the show look old and real is key. Selfridge's office on set features such items as an old lamp, a big desk and a fireplace. A Selfridges sign and such mottos as 'Each day counts in building a business' can also be found. Art director Jo Riddell says she left the general principles of Selfridges and its look at the time in tact. "But the lifts are enhanced and the revolving doors sexed up a bit" to look like they would later in time to make the look more appealing and timely and possibly allow further seasons to be shot without the need for major changes, she says. Rob Harris, production designer on the show, said that Downton Abbey had the advantage of an existing building. "We can't film at Selfridges, so, we had to create a major player in the show from scratch. And our decision was to make things a tad modern." For example, the show uses early cars instead of horses, which were still common at the time. "That helps to convey his modern thinking" about shopping, Harris said about the Selfridge character. Even the working replica of the plane in which Louis Bleriot first flew the English Channel is used for one of Selfridge’s promotions.

Intended to be screened over two series of five episodes, TV insiders are confident that, like Downton, it will run and run. Although the show taps into renewed interest in UK period drama, it is actually international in tone and feel, says ITV Studios Global Entertainment MD, Maria Kyriacou. "Mr Selfridge is not defined by being British, it’s actually a quintessentially American story about a guy who came from nowhere, and it is not a class-based piece of British history," she states. "There’s a huge openness in places including the US at the moment for high-end UK drama, but this is not defined by the territory it comes from." The story arc follows Harry and his family, staff, business partners and adversaries from the opening of his huge London store. London provides the backdrop and the series captures London life in that era, from the boardroom to the theatres and the back streets. "The period element is secondary to Mr Selfridge being an engaging tale", Kyriacou adds. "It’s not about it being a period piece, it’s just a good story from a great writer and it has much higher production values than other shows out of the UK. That and the cast elevate it above most of the other drama out there."

So, while Mr Selfridge has the same glossy feel as Downton, Davies insists that it is certainly not "Downton in a shop". They are, he says, totally different, with Downton concentrating on preserving an era, while Mr Selfridge captures the excitement, fun and wickedness of the master showman who created a brave new liberating world for women by putting the sex into shopping with his paint and powder. Through the innovations and spectacular events Harry staged within the store, the stories will shine a light on hidden moments of the history of women, be it fashion, cosmetics, technology or domestic affairs. Davies says: "We have different values to Downton. We are about glamour, modernity and are also anti-aristocracy."

Davies' source material is Lindy Woodhead’s 2007 biography Shopping, Seduction and Mr Selfridge. Upon its first publication in 2007, Evening Standard called Woodhead’s book 'an enthralling description of fashion,' the Sunday Telegraph said it 'conveys the excitement of changes in fashion and technology in the late Edwardian era' with Vogue attesting it 'will change your view of shopping forever'. On why he undertook the task of bringing the 'showman of shopping' to television, he says: "Selfridge liked to live on the edge, he was addicted to risk and enjoyed being in debt. And despite being a dedicated family man, deeply in love with his wife and devoted to his four children, he was fatally drawn to other women – and the women he chose tended to be wildly attractive, high-maintenance and unstable. A rich mix indeed."

All of which makes it surprising that Piven suffered the indignity of having his first sex scene in the opener cut. It showed Selfridge getting rid of his current mistress after learning that his wife and children were arriving. "We thought it might put people off him, that he was being unfaithful to his wife before we’d even got to know him," Davies explains. But Piven took it in his stride. "It’s not an ego blow," he insists. "From decades of auditioning, you grow a very thick skin."


A mistress who fairs slightly better, at least initially, is sultry star of London’s West End, Ellen Love. She's brought to the screen by Zoe Tapper, who was so determined to win the role she travelled to the audition in a faux-fur coat, a bright red dress, fake diamond earrings and siren red lips. "I got some funny looks but I didn’t care because I felt very Ellen Love-ish," she smiles. "And I got the part, so it was worth it." Although a potential marriage wrecker, Tapper says she had so much sympathy for her. "Harry lusts after her," she explains. "He sets her up in an apartment and makes her the face of Selfridges. But once he owns her she’s like a trinket that’s lost its lustre. He discards her and she spirals out of control." Likening her to Marilyn Monroe or Holly Golightly, Tapper thinks Love is "a social butterfly, blowing kisses to the crowds, but she has gossamer wings."

As Andrew Davies likes to "inject a bit of naughtiness" to give his scripts a modern feel, Tapper says his actresses have to be up for anything. "I do a dance number in pink pyjamas while hurling teddy bears into the audience from the stage of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane," she laughs. "There’s also a scene where Ellen poses as the face of Selfridges, on the wing of Blériot’s historic, Channel-crossing plane. [They managed to get a replica inside the Neasden set, just as Harry had managed to get the real thing into the store in 1909.] She’s draped in scarves like Isadora Duncan." The cocaine-snorting scenes were also a hoot. "Opium was possibly more the drug of choice in those days, but cocaine is Ellen’s poison. Before putting it up my nose, I made the props department tell me what was in it – mostly flour and lactose powder. I made them take a bit themselves, though – just to be on the safe side."

As mother to a 17-month-old daughter, Ava, it will be clear to anyone tuning in to Mr Selfridge that the shapely Tapper has lost the baby weight quite quickly. "But it’s annoying when women say, ‘Oh, I’m lucky. I’m just naturally skinny,’" she grumbles. "In my case, I walked everywhere with the buggy after Ava was born and ate sensibly. I thought I might go to the gym, but it never happened. Now, I do a bit of yoga or pilates at home while Ava sleeps." Which means she wouldn’t be ashamed to show her post-baby body on screen? "Women’s bodies change – mine has – and we should celebrate it," she says. "I’ve always admired Kate Winslet. She has a lovely body, but it’s not a perfect Hollywood size zero. It’s the body of a woman who’s had children." As an actress, though, she says she is careful about nudity. "There’s a danger in our industry for women to feel pressurised to take their clothes off," she says. "I’ve certainly done it, but only, I hope, where the script and the character required it. In Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky I took off my clothes because I was playing a prostitute. What else would you expect? But I can’t bear it when you’re looking at breasts on screen for no particular reason. At this stage, I think I know the difference."

Harry Selfridge, of course, is smitten from the first time he sees her. "Ellen underestimates Harry at first," thinks Tapper. "She’s quite used to the attention of men and perhaps uses them for their spoils. But Harry comes along and is quite similar to Ellen in a way. He also shines too brightly and they’re both massively drawn to one another. It takes her by surprise that she actually ends up falling in love with him. Her barriers go down. She loves and relishes the jewels, the glamour and the fame that is attached to him. But she underestimates the fact that she has actually fallen for him as well. Harry is very good at playing the family man as well as the lover. He enjoys spoiling Ellen and giving her this platform for more fame and glamour, as well as jewels and an apartment. Ellen is very much the other woman, a sexy red-lipped showgirl. But at the same time there’s almost an innocence to her in that she believes her own hype. She’s enjoying herself, living her moment and doesn’t necessarily realise the reality of the situation at all. Harry thinks that when he’s finished with her that will be it and he can go on to the next woman. But Ellen has other ideas. He can’t get rid of her that easily."


Meanwhile Harry is busy making important connections to increase his standing in British society – namely in the form of Coronation Street actress Katherine Kelly. She glides elegantly on to the shop floor as Lady Mae Loxley – one of Edwardian London’s most powerful socialites whose connections prove vital in building the Selfridges empire. It’s her first TV role for a year ago and she explodes back on to the screen as an immaculate brunette with a cut-glass accent and a penchant for very young lovers. Lady Mae is a former Gaiety Girl who begins a new life after marrying Lord Loxley (clearly for money). We never see him because, happily for her, he prefers the country while she lives it up in town. "Watch out for the hats – they can cause an eclipse," Kelly warns. "She has to have the biggest and the best. Sometimes they had to completely change the camera angles to shoot around my hats." Lady Mae bails out Harry, who runs up huge debts transforming the high street shopping experience. "It’s not until you know her a bit more that you find out she’s a suffragette and wants Harry to endorse the cause and actively support it," she reveals.

Mr. Selfridge is set at a time of great change for women. "The suffragette movement was beginning to get into its stride and certainly in Andrew Davies’ adaptation Harry Selfridge is in favour of this and actively supports it," adds Tapper. "It was a great time for the emancipation of women. And in a funny sort of way the whole shopping experience that Harry Selfridge created almost aided that. It suddenly became a respectable pastime for women to go shopping, it allowed them to go out without a chaperone. He opened his store to any class of woman with something for everyone from bargain basement to high end luxury goods. Andrew has written some fabulous, really strong female roles for this drama. At the time things were really happening for women and it’s exciting to film that."

Mr Selfridge instinctively understood a lot about women while Piven – often pictured with a pretty girl on his arm – claims to be the opposite. "I know very little," he sighs. "This is a character who is devoted to his wife and kids but strays. I don’t judge him, but try to give him as much integrity as possible. It’s a bit like a Greek tragedy. You need to celebrate his whole life, which was incredible." Davies, creator of the BBC’s highly-acclaimed Pride And Prejudice, says he was also drawn to Selfridge’s personality. "He’s a charismatic hero with self-destructive tendencies at the centre of a drama that explores the world of business and the joys and traumas of family life," he says. "I began to see parallels to my favourite TV show The Sopranos."

Davies says his very rich central character made his job easy. You can say that again. Harry Gordon Selfridge has the ultimate rags-to-riches-to-rags story. The only surprise is no one has thought to tell his tale before. He went from an upbringing in a single-parent home to the man who became known as the Earl of Oxford Street. But he died a pauper. "The fascinating thing is that the fruit of his labour is still here today – we can all go to Selfridges – and it’s in the same building," says Davies. "The present company has been enormously enthusiastic about the whole thing – well, it will be terrific publicity for them. 'They’ve shown us around and given us access to their archives. The only thing they haven’t done is allowed us to go around the shop and choose something for free. But you can’t have everything!"

A showman and marketing genius from a young age, Harry worked his way up the ladder at Chicago department store Field Leiter and Company, where he’s credited with coining the phrases 'The customer is always right' and 'Only so many shopping days until Christmas'. He became wealthy and married Rosalie Buckingham of a prominent Chicago family. While on holiday in London he spotted an opportunity and returned a few months later with £400,000 (around £23 million in today’s money) to set up Selfridges on Oxford Street.

The first ten-part series of Mr Selfridge – there will hopefully be four series to cover Harry’s eventful life – focuses on 1909, when he opened the store. We see him arriving from Chicago with his wife and four children. She never settled down awfully well and kept going back to America. "It didn’t help that he also had his mother living with them – she was a formidable old lady who’d been very strict with him. But when they got to London even she wasn’t able to keep him on the straight and narrow," continues Davies, laughing at the rules Harry made for his store. "They emphatically said there should be no hanky-panky between staff but there was a lot going on and Harry himself was the main culprit."

He was an unashamed womaniser – having affairs with dancers Isadora Duncan and Anna Pavlova, and French singer Gaby Deslys. Once Rosalie died, his sexual proclivities knew no bounds. His love of women was to be the main reason for his eventual ruin – dancing twins Jenny and Rosie Dolly gambled away more than £5 million of his fortune. Although the first series focuses on Harry’s happier early days, Andrew says, ‘You have a sense of the tragedy to come. He’s quite a problematic character from the start. He has his demons and by the end of the series his marriage is on the rocks. There’s quite a bit of darkness there.’

While Harry is obviously the main character, Andrew has created a vast supporting cast. It’s a mixture of real people and invented characters. "It feels like a big ocean liner – there’s a sense of a huge enterprise moving forward with Selfridge at the helm. We’ve used a lot of the real things Harry got up to to publicise his store. If someone was in the news he’d get them in. Anna Pavlova came in and did a private dance. He got Blériot – the first person to fly the Channel – in with his plane and thousands of people came to see it. But we’ve invented other characters our audience will hopefully love. We have a lovely young working-class girl called Agnes Towler, played by Aisling Loftus, who’s like our little heroine, and Zoë Tapper plays a girl we’ve called Ellen Love, Harry’s first mistress. There are lots of tremulous moments that are beautifully played. They’ll twang a few heartstrings."

Davies saya he was thrilled to get Piven, best known for playing the explosive Ari Gold in Entourage, as his Mr Selfridge. "I love his character in Entourage – he’s somebody who could get away with more than most people, just as Selfridge does," he says. "In the flesh he’s also very charismatic and cheeky and he has a playful manner that I’ve written into the script. Like Harry, he grew up in Chicago. But Jeremy’s a bit of a man of mystery too. You never quite know where he is, what he’s doing or what he’s thinking. It’s surprising." Davies tends to meet the show’s actors during read-throughs of the script. "I try to not go on set much," he says drily. "There’s never much for me to do apart from telling the actors how wonderful they are – they like that. I do most of my work in my study but I do try to go to read-throughs. Because the cast have got to know each other they’ve become like jolly get-togethers."

Often the actors will sneak up to me with good ideas for things their characters might do next. Ways in which their parts can be expanded and so on. Sometimes they work their way into the script. "We have this wonderful French actor called Grégory Fitoussi, who plays the head of design," he explains. "In that clichéd way I was thinking his character would be gay but when Grégory arrived he said, 'I don’t see many women for me in this story. Usually I have many women.' And I thought, 'Yes, you probably do need some women.' I love it when the actors make you change your opinion about a character."

Former university lecturer Andrew is best known for his adaptations for the BBC – this is his first ITV commission since Dr Zhivago a decade ago. But he had a little fall-out with the channel when it cancelled two of the shows he was working on and announced it would be doing fewer corset dramas. Now he’s working in direct competition with the BBC, which, as we know, was determined its own show about a department store, The Paradise, would beat Mr Selfridge in the ratings and changed transmission dates so it aired first. The Paradise attracted ratings of around five million – half of what Downton and Call The Midwife pick up. "As soon as it became known we were doing Mr Selfridge they dusted down this idea they’d had on the back burner for ten years and decided to do it. It was a surprise they got it on air before us, but I did enjoy it. I’m confident, though, that we have a terrific show and hopefully even more people will watch us."

Indeed, ITV are so confident Davies is already working on the second series. "I’ve really had fun writing this," he says. "I’ve even managed to get interested in fashion. Undergarments principally. Corsets have always been an interest of mine." And with a cheeky laugh he’s off to imagine more shenanigans for Mr Selfridge and his staff.
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