TV face-off

It's a TV face-off: can Precious Ramotswe see off He Kills Coppers? ponders Caitlin Moran...

Ooooh, it's a drama war between the BBC and ITV1! On the same day, in the same time slot, we have He Kills Coppers v The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency! How flattering of the big broadcasters, to presume that, instead of spending Sunday night looking for talking cats on YouTube, what we really want is some classy drama, which we will appreciate, because we are cultured, and dead posh, and eat sandwiches with a knife and fork. Off a plate.

As it turns out, you don't need to be posh at all for The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. You could be eating cornflakes off the floor with your face for all it demands of you. Whenever you see the credit “adapted by Richard Curtis”, you know you are unlikely to wander into an hour of killer replicants, Jungian dream sequences and random narrative time shifts. And, sure enough, The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency is, like the book that spawned it, “charming”. It's all “lovely shots of giraffes in the bush” this, and “people quoting old African proverbs at each other while drinking rooibos tea on the veranda” that. And endless amounts of “Jill Scott as Precious Ramotswe, being a warm-hearted, maverick woman” the other. It might as well be called the “We Love Jill Scott's Gentle Eyes and Indomitable Spirit Show”.

In fact, if you put aside the faintly incongruous side-plot about witchcraft and child sacrifice - I know! How unexpectedly and randomly dark! - then The No 1 Ladies' actually plays out like a Botswanan version of The Vicar of Dibley. Here's the “sturdy” Precious Ramotswe (Scott), breaking with all traditions and taking on a job (detective) that was previously the employ of men. Here's her slightly odd, socially maladroit sidekick (Anika Noni Rose as Grace Makutsi), whom she takes under her wing. Here's the village she moves to, full of both a) lovely scenery and b) eccentric, handily plot-generating local characters.

No wonder Curtis chucked his hat into the ring to adapt the book. Once the proper series starts - this is just the pilot - he can dig out a couple of old scripts, scribble out “Dibley” and “labrador” and replace them with “Gaborone” and “lion”, and then take the rest of the afternoon off. And why not? I like Curtis. I like his cheery films that believe in love. It's no crime to make warm, accessible, prime-time dramas - although from the amount of sniffy comments people have been making about The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, you'd think it was. And besides, it's scarcely like the pappy, artless Wild at Heart, but with some mysteries. This is a prime-time drama with an all-black cast, and cinematography by the sadly departed Anthony Minghella - you don't get too many of them to the pound. And it also has the year's best cameo so far - David Oyelowo as a musky, jivey, priapic stud-stoat practically writhing off the screen with glee. He needs to play a hyperactive sleazebag in tight trousers more often. He has a great talent. And the ladies will know what I mean when they watch it.

However, if you can bear to leave the warm, bath-like ease of The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, then do flick over to the categorically superior He Kills Coppers on ITV1 - not least for its opening monologue from Rafe Spall, which might be the most Cockney thing that's ever happened. I can't tell you how excitingly he delivers the phrase “Not that I gave a shit - I'm a bloody good thief taker, and I knew where I was going.” I've been trying to crowbar a poor impression into conversations all week. The children have taken it very badly.

He Kills Coppers is superior, feel-the-lining-on-this stuff - bafflingly good for ITV1. Spall is a low, sure, hypnotic note - a cocksure, slightly bent rookie detective in 1966; all fags, Brylcreem and tarts. The great casting continues with the mesmeric Kelly Reilly as a prostitute who is both fragile and brassily capable: a certain kind of working-class girl you got in “the olden days”, who was a feminist before feminism was invented. Alas, the retro detailing seems to extend to the sound-mix, which seems to have been done through a single mono loudspeaker in 1966 - whole swaths of dialogue are inaudible. But if you have subtitles on your TV, this is definitely the winner of the Sunday Night Drama Stand-Off.

The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, Easter Day, BBC One, 9pm; He Kills Coppers, Easter Day, ITV1, 9pm

Further reading: Jill Scott is the soul of a gumshoe; Precious Ramotswe: a very special investigator; The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency

The John Adams legacy

The Washington premiere of the new HBO miniseries John Adams would have been catnip for congressmen even without the appearances by producer Tom Hanks, writer David McCullough, and lead actor Paul Giamatti. For the event, held in an ornate chamber of a House office building, HBO not only reproduced John Trumbull's painting of the Declaration of Independence, which hangs in the Capitol rotunda, but it also made a copy of its ornate gold frame, to rim the screen on which one of the episodes was shown.

Representative William D. Delahunt, whose district includes the Adamses' hometown of Quincy (then Braintree), was happy to declare himself - with tongue only partly in cheek - as a descendant of Adams's tradition of public service. And the other members of Congress in the audience were there to appreciate what Hanks and McCullough clearly intended to be a celebration of civic virtues.

Hanks spoke of how public schools don't teach the fact that Adams, as a young trial lawyer, chose to represent the British guard commander responsible for the Boston Massacre, in a show of commitment to the rule of law over the mob rule. McCullough spoke of the importance of showing the human frailties of his subjects, but in a way that serves to point out the times when they rise above petty concerns and accomplished great deeds.

The series episode covering the Declaration of Independence vividly justified McCullough's approach, highlighting a moment of political courage that transcends anything the current Congress has achieved or even contemplated. But if current members felt chastened, argues Peter S. Canellos, they might consider some other benchmarks in Adams's political career that might feel more familiar.



To be sure, Adams's role in helping to write the Declaration of Independence, along with his many diplomatic accomplishments before and during his presidency, put him in the first rank of Founding Fathers. Within that group, he was the only one to have a family life worthy of modern praise, with a wife who was his intellectual equal and a brilliant son who served a term in the White House himself.

But he also played a significant role in establishing other traditions of American politics - less storied, but perhaps more enduring as a framework for today's Congress and White House. Firstly, he helped invent the two-party system. While his predecessor as president, George Washington, strived to be a national magistrate rising above all political machinations, Adams participated in two hotly contested presidential races. In the first, he prevailed over Thomas Jefferson; in the second, he lost to Jefferson. America was probably destined to have a two-party system, but Adams's ornery personality, which polarized voters, helped hasten its arrival.

Secondly, he was accused of the most audacious act of political patronage in history. In between his loss to Jefferson and the start of the new administration, along with a Congress dominated by Jefferson's fellow Republicans, Adams and his fellow Federalists tried to install 82 judges, enough to control the national judicial system for decades. Some historians believe he was acting in a far-sighted way to build a durable system of federal courts; others, noting that one of the judges was his 31-year-old nephew who had gone bankrupt in a failed land speculation, saw a different motive.

Similarly, he practised a bitter form of partisanship. When Adams was inaugurated as president, Washington, in a powerful symbolic gesture, stayed for the swearing in and then walked behind the new chief. With his magnanimity, Washington established the tradition of peaceful transfers of power. Four years later, a bitter Adams high-tailed out of town on the morning of Jefferson's inauguration without attending.

He also established the tradition of former presidents fighting for their place in posterity. Convinced that Jefferson would be remembered as a more important figure, because of his primary authorship of the Declaration of Independence and his more successful presidency, Adams spent almost a quarter-century trying to call attention to his own accomplishments. In the process, he sought to knock down many of his contemporaries. Jefferson was also sensitive to his reputation, but was more successful at maintaining an aura of high purpose - just as Adams had feared.

Where Adams went, many Clevelands, Hoovers, Nixons, and Clintons followed, seeking to buttress their images. So if the Founding Father who "united the states of America" - as the blurb of the HBO series promises - seems a little out of reach for today's politicians, they can always seek inspiration from the other Adams - the distressingly human Adams - who might be at home in today's Washington.

David Walliams on playing Frankie Howerd

David Walliams talks to Daphne Lockyer about love, camp and the challenges of playing his childhood hero Frankie Howerd...

If proof were ever needed that David Walliams has hit the comedy big time, it came not so long ago while he and Matt Lucas were on their 2006 Little Britain Live tour. “After one performance, Kate Moss and Pete Doherty came backstage, but so did Sir Paul McCartney,” Walliams says. “We had to keep Kate and Pete waiting while we were talking to Sir Paul. And I’m sorry, but I do still get excited about that sort of thing. There is still a big wow factor involved in my own success.”

The kind of success that he’s talking about includes the ability to fill stadiums to capacity, to name his price on an upcoming HBO version of Little Britain in the US, and to turn his hand, if he so chooses, to serious acting roles, like his recent performance in Stephen Poliakoff’s highbrow TV drama Capturing Mary. On the home front, too, he seems conspicuously to enjoy all the trappings of the high life. He lives in Noel Gallagher’s old house, Supernova Heights in Primrose Hill, and has dated a bevy of celebrity mag princesses. He drives a soft-top Mercedes sports car, and is a stalwart of the London party scene. A far cry, indeed, he admits, from the often down-at-heel and slightly tragic types that are his forte on Little Britain. For while in the show he plays carer Lou, all shell suit and dodgy dentistry, or Anne, the madwoman in a winceyette nightie, in real life you’re more likely to find him posing on the pages of Esquire in a Savile Row suit, hair slicked back, something that looks suspiciously like a sense of absurdity at his own situation playing behind his eyes and twitching at the corners of his mouth.

“There is part of me that does wonder, ‘How on earth did I get here?’” he says. The answer is through sheer determination. Walliams is not just a party animal; he has a reputation for strenuous, even obsessively hard work – whether creating sketches and characters for Little Britain or training, as he did in 2006, for a successful cross-Channel swim. His trainer back then, modern pentathlete Greg Whyte, says he has never encountered a similar level of dedication in anyone, including the Olympians he has trained. “An incredibly tenacious and single-minded individual, he didn’t miss a single training session in nine months.”

Not surprisingly, then, when I meet him today on the set of his latest project – a BBC Four drama in which he stars as the iconic comedian Frankie Howerd – he is displaying the same commitment all over again. Even when no one has called for action on today’s scene, a recreation of the famous speech given by Howerd at the Oxford Union in 1990, Walliams can be spotted running through an inventory of Howerd’s facial tics and physical mannerisms. He plants the palms of his hands on his lumbar region in the manner of Lurcio in Up Pompeii, raises his eyebrows and puffs out his cheeks in an “Ooh missus” gesture. By the time the camera rolls on the scene, the resemblance is uncanny.

Clearly, Walliams feels a deep connection to the role, not least, perhaps, because he can relate to some of the darker aspects of Howerd’s nature. As Frankie Howerd: Rather You Than Me demonstrates, the comedian suffered from depressive interludes all his adult life. Walliams, too, has fought his own demons. In the late Nineties, just as he and Lucas were enjoying their big professional break – they were about to film the first TV series of Little Britain – Walliams became exhausted and anxious, struggling to get to sleep, only to wake in a cold sweat with nightmares. He admitted himself to a psychiatric hospital.

“Looking back, I suppose I was just unhappy for personal reasons, and if you’re unhappy for a long period of time, you stop being unhappy and start being depressed. You get to the point where you just can’t see the future,” he explains. “And that was where I was. But plenty of people have suffered from depression, including Frankie Howerd himself.”

Howerd’s depression – both its origins and the controversial LSD therapy he received in the Sixties – form the cornerstone of the revealing BBC Four drama. From the same stable as 2006’s Kenneth Williams: Fantabulosa! and last year’s Fear of Fanny, about Fanny Craddock, it is one of a season of four new dramas that will examine the private woes of public icons of the Sixties and Seventies. The Curse of Steptoe has Phil Davis and Jason Isaacs playing Wilfrid Brambell and Harry H. Corbett, two actors who loathed each other but were yoked together by their success for all eternity. Hancock and Joan, starring Ken Stott and Maxine Peake, will tell the tale of Tony Hancock’s affair with Joan Le Mesurier. Hughie Green, Most Sincerely, with Trevor Eve, explores the double life of the avuncular host of the hugely successful TV shows Opportunity Knocks and Double Your Money.

Each presents a no-holds-barred insight into its subject. Howerd, for example, is depicted as a toupee-wearing, conflicted but predatory homosexual, given to crippling self-doubt. Not, then, the most flattering portrait. Yet, according to Walliams, the drama attempts to understand and explain rather than to expose. “Hopefully, we’re shedding some light on what made Frankie tick and on why, along with the great high points in his career, there was also at times so much vulnerability and pathos, and many low points.”

In comedy terms, Walliams, after all, sees himself as a direct descendant of funnymen like Frankie Howerd and Kenneth Williams. He owes them a debt of honour. “There is a long heritage of camp comedy in Britain – we’re a culture that has always loved pantomime dames, for example. Matt and I are from the same tradition of camp British comedians; we have always found that kind of thing funny.

“If anything, Frankie played down his gayness. In fact, if you had to pick one image of him it would probably be as Lurcio in Up Pompeii, surrounded by all these busty women. Preparing to play him, I was watching tapes of the Oxford Union show that we’re filming here today, and he talks about having an affair with an older woman. And part of you thinks, ‘Ooh no. I don’t think so.’ But the other part sort of believes him. He could almost pass, you know.”

Walliams, who on screen is often easily camp enough to pass as gay, could almost be accused of playing down his straightness, his sexuality having been the subject of a “gay-o-meter” in The Sun. Snapped at Nobu with a beautiful starlet? The gay-o-meter flips to solidly straight. Seen shopping in Prada in Bond Street? He’s back in the pink. “When they find out that I get fellated by Rafe Spall in this, the gay-o-meter will go fuchsia,” he jokes, referring to his co-star in the production. “I also get to share a bath with him and we touch each other’s penises, which was a thrill for us both. Although afterwards there was a lot of talking about girls and studying Nuts and Zoo magazines. A lot of reasserting our heterosexuality.”

For Walliams, a bit of ambiguity is useful professionally. “It allows me to go off in different directions, because I’m not fixed on one thing.” For Howerd, on and off stage, ambiguity about his sexuality was vital – both because he was ashamed of it, and because homosexual acts were illegal for much of his life. There was another, deeper reason for Howerd’s shame, however. This was revealed to the drama’s writer, Peter Harness, during conversations with Howerd’s partner of 37 years, Dennis Heymer (played here by Spall).

Heymer, who has never spoken on the record before, supplied unique insights into Howerd’s life, including shocking revelations that, during his childhood, he had been sexually abused by his father. Walliams himself visited Heymer at the couple’s house in Somerset. “Dennis told me that when they had sex, Frankie would always cry when he had an orgasm. Just imagine going through that. I think he just associated sexual pleasure with shame and pain and sexual abuse, although, of course, I’m only guessing.”

Walliams clearly feels deeply for his subject. Howerd has been a hero since, at the age of 14, he was taken by his parents, Kathleen and Peter, to see a performance of the musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Three years later, in 1988, Walliams waited outside the Secombe Theatre in Sutton for his autograph. “I was asked recently how long I’d been preparing to play Frankie and I said, ‘Ooh, about 20 years.’ I know that I wouldn’t have wanted to see anybody else playing Frankie.”

Raised in Banstead, a suburban village in Surrey, Walliams’s background seems conventional enough. He comes from a loving and supportive family – today, on set, his mum has arrived, as she does on all her son’s projects, with a cake for the cast and crew. Still, Walliams describes his childhood self as a bit of a loner. Matt Lucas has described Walliams as “a premier-division shagger of beautiful women”. Indeed, Walliams likes women and women like him right back: just take a straw poll of all your female friends if you don’t believe me. “Personally, I’d much rather be around women than around men. Women are just better, nicer, more interesting. They are more caring and emotional. They talk about things that are important rather than talking about football… I love women,” he says.

“I was quite a solitary kid,” he admits. “Quite happy to sit in my room listening to the records of Frankie Howerd, Tony Hancock, Monty Python and Rowan Atkinson. Even then I was trying to learn from them.” When they first met at the National Youth Theatre, Walliams and Matt Lucas cemented their relationship over impressions of their comedy heroes, especially Frankie Howerd. Oddly, they were due to be filming their HBO Little Britain series when the Howerd role came up. Had it not been for the US writers’ strike, Walliams would have been unavailable. Now, however, the US series is back on track. “It’s going to be interesting to see if American audiences find it funny,” says Walliams. He and Lucas intend to retain the essentially British humour of Little Britain. “It would be a big mistake to change it.”

Still, they are introducing some new characters, including Madonna’s PA, and giving an American slant to some of the old favourites. Vicky Pollard, for example, will be sent to Brat Camp, and Sebastian becomes Prime Minister and develops a crush on the US president. Walliams’s assertion that, in real life, he is closer to Sebastian than any other Little Britain character has occasionally been wheeled out as evidence of his own latent gayness. “But it isn’t his homosexuality that I relate to at all,” Walliams explains. “It’s the unrequited love.”

His own parents, he says, were together for 47 years, up until his father’s devastating death from cancer shortly before the filming of Rather You Than Me. “How do you find the kind of enduring love that my parents had?” he ponders. “At this moment, I haven’t a clue.” None of the high-profile beauties that he has dated have turned out to be the one. Now, aged 36, he is thinking that the next big adventure should, perhaps, be fatherhood. “But I don’t think I could be further away from becoming a father than I am right now. I haven’t got a girlfriend for a start and you need that, don’t you?”

Still, there are advantages to being single. “I get to take my mum to awards ceremonies and, recently, to the final of Strictly Come Dancing. I don’t know who was more excited about meeting Bruce Forsyth, her or me. Mind you, I’ve suddenly started to think, ‘Am I going to end up like Kenneth Williams, going on holiday with my mum?’ Maybe my friend Barbara Windsor could come, too.” Walliams chuckles to himself. And despite what the last comment will do for his positioning on the gay-o-meter, he seems to like the idea. “Yes, Mum and Barbara and me. How lovely,” he says quite seriously. Titter ye not, as Frankie Howerd would say.

Frankie Howerd: Rather You Than Me will be broadcast on BBC Four on Wednesday, April 9

Further reading: Scriptwriters reject the 'Curse of Comedy'

Joseph Mawle: Playing Jesus

Playing the Son of God is not an easy role- particularly for up-and-coming actor Joseph Mawle, who has had to overcome deafness and dyslexia to play Jesus in BBC 1's The Passion. Cassandra Jardine reports...

I have met Jesus. Appropriately, he is 33 years old. Less suitably, he has short brown hair, strangely slanted green eyes and lacks confidence. He is also profoundly dyslexic and largely deaf. Perhaps anyone would be nervous, having been catapulted from obscurity into playing the Son of God, but Joseph Mawle felt ill-equipped for such a divine part. On the farm in Warwickshire where he grew up, church-going was a Christmas- and Easter-only affair. "My family were Christian but definitely not evangelical," he says, rather overstating, I suspect, his parents' enthusiasm. "Does that make me Mary?" his mother asked, irreverently, when he told her he had been offered the part.

Mawle describes himself as a "humanist" - a careful choice of words designed not to offend, because there are many dangers lurking for the man who plays Jesus. Robert Powell, who starred in Zeffirelli's 1977 film Jesus of Nazareth, said: "You always offend someone, and never live up to someone else's expectations." Seeking guidance on how to play the role, one of Mawle's first ideas was to approach Powell for advice. "I contacted him through his agent, but he never got in touch," he says. Then a minor miracle occurred. "The day I was flying out to Morocco to begin filming, I walked into the toilet at the airport and there he was, washing his hands. I tapped him on the shoulder and told him who I was."

"Oh my God," said Powell (or is that just fanciful?) Then they both stood staring at each other, dumbstruck. "Finally, I asked him if he had any advice and all he said was: 'It's one of the hardest jobs you'll ever do'." That wasn't much help. Not for someone who was already over-awed by the prospect of working alongside more experienced actors. James Nesbitt plays Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, and Ben Daniels is the high priest, Caiaphas, in this even-handed version of the Passion, which makes the "baddies" more sympathetic than usual and upgrades Mary Magdalene from prostitute to widow. But there remain hordes of disciples in beards and droopy robes, among whom Jesus has to stand out.

Powell established Jesus's otherness by never blinking. "If I had tried that," says Mawle, "I would have ended up blinking like a madman." The research was not easy. He read the gospels in six translations, but they weren't as much help as he had hoped. "There's no description of his physical attributes. They just tell the journey and the teachings. I was left with a blank canvas but a vast responsibility, as everyone in the Western world has their own image of him."

Further reading was required - a chore for a man who is so dyslexic that he spent his early teenage years in a boarding school for special needs. "Look, I've got it here," he says, scrabbling in his bag for The Jesus I Never Knew by Philip Yancey, which has been his trusty companion this past year. He read it again and again to get under the skin of the Galilean carpenter who lived 2,000 years ago. The thing that stood out for him was a single sentence: "God didn't cheat."

"What I think he meant was that Jesus felt everything a man would feel. He's incredibly human, he expresses fears, anger, lust, love. For me, he not only made the sacrifice of his death but the sacrifice of not having a family. He and Mary Magdalene really loved each other."

The facial hair that made Mawle look like the face on the Turin shroud during filming has long gone. But even cleaned up he has a strange intensity. I can see why Nigel Stafford-Clark, the producer of Bleak House, who cast him, describes him as having "a way of holding your attention". When you talk to him, he watches your face intently, lip-reading. I've been told that he doesn't like to talk about his deafness, but that turns out not to be true. He doesn't want to be seen as a deaf actor, but he doesn't mind talking about being an actor who has overcome a disability. In daily life, he wears two discreet hearing aids, but he takes them off when he's acting because they produce a foggy sound. "It feels more natural not to wear them. I can usually tell when people are about to speak from their quirks and tics - though there have been times when I've had to ask a director to pinch my foot so I know when to come in."

He wasn't so sanguine about the deafness when it first struck at 16. Even before that he was having a difficult time. One of three children, his mother was a teacher and his father a farmer - a background that gives him the distinction, rare among actors, of having tractor-driving as a skill. But being dyslexic made his school life hard. He once played Dick Whittington at primary school but he was "too unconfident" to do more acting there, or at the boarding school he attended from 13 to 16. He won't name it, but he had a "really tough time" there; meanwhile, his parents were splitting up. "The best times were Saturday film nights. I disappeared into those films. I left there a quiet, passionate person who wanted to act."

Mawle left school at 16 to pursue that ambition, but almost immediately got an infection - labyrinthitis - which destroyed the hairs of his inner ears, leaving him 70 per cent hearing-impaired in the upper register and with tinnitus, a constant ringing in the ears. "Deaf. Dyslexic. Give up, man," remarked a helpful friend. "It was a dark time," he says. "I spent a lot of time in the gym, channelling all my angst and aggression into making myself huge. Really, it was a cry for help." At 16 he weighed 13 stone and had only 4 per cent body fat.

Living alone in a caravan in his grandparents' garden, near Stratford-upon-Avon, he felt he had nothing more to lose, so he begged the director of the local college to let him study drama. He worked as a fitness instructor, washed dishes and did some tiny acting parts before he applied to the Bristol Old Vic theatre school, which had recently taken on two blind students. He got a scholarship, but even after voice training his troubles weren't over. He left in 2002 with no agent and worked as an assistant in a special needs school. Life was looking bleak until his disability suddenly became a selling point.

A deaf actor was needed for the lead role in Soundproof, a TV drama. "Everything came from that," he says. Parts in Persuasion, Silent Witness, Foyle's War and Clapham Junction followed. He met a girlfriend in the pub on "deaf night", though he is now single. Then Jesus happened. Stafford-Clark's idea was to make a naturalistic drama about the last week in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. It starts with him buying a donkey on the outskirts of Jerusalem so that he can enter the city riding on it, in accordance with prophecies about the coming of the Messiah. There's a documentary feel to the way the drama unfolds. Pilate is trying to keep this troublesome province under control because it's the trade route to Rome for wealth from Syria. Caiaphas doesn't want trouble. And then Jesus arrives to stir up an already explosive situation.

Filming wasn't much fun. It was boiling hot in the Moroccan desert and Mawle's dyslexia and deafness made learning the lines hard. But it was his disability that, in the end, gave him his way into the part. "I came to see Jesus as a modern man who gave time to everybody. He loved humans, he wanted them to excel. When I first got a taste of religion, I thought it was all don't do this or that. As I learnt more about Jesus, I found he had a more positive message: use your gifts."

That thought gave him courage, but still he was often so nervous that he turned for help to David Oyewolo, who played Henry VI for the RSC and is Joseph of Arimathea in The Passion. "He's straight-down-the-line religious and that was very calming. I was getting mixed up with words and so I asked him what it meant to be humble. He said, 'It means asking for help'." Mawle's humility turned out to be his best qualification for the part.

The Passion is on BBC1 on Sunday, 8pm

Further reading: A bold new interpretation of The Passion; Jesus and Judas in one week Holy Week

John Adams reviewed

Like a declaration of war against any contenders at this year's Emmys, HBO's John Adams arrives Sunday, with a cast far beyond the standards of mere mortal television -- Paul Giamatti! Laura Linney! Tom Wilkinson! -- and production values of Spielbergian proportions. Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by David McCullough, it follows, in seven episodes, the adult life of the man often considered the most influential and, ironically, least well-known of our country's founders. It is gorgeous, precise and at times poetic. If only it were more interesting, groans Mary McNamara...

I feel like a heretic writing those words, but there they are and I won't take them back. Historical drama, if it is any good, always serves two masters -- story and period detail. In that order. Unfortunately, so smitten are the creators of John Adams with historical earnestness and pedigree they seem to have forgotten how to tell a good story. Which is pretty astonishing considering what a great story it is to tell. Love, war, sex, politics, danger, betrayal, depraved foreign courts, postal issues -- the life of John Adams has it all, and a short, bristling, ill-tempered but still brilliant and yes, sexy, protagonist to boot. A Colonial "House" without the Vicodin addiction.

Yet writer Kirk Ellis and director Tom Hooper seem determined, especially in early episodes, to make it not so. Zealously illuminating the often ghastly nature of the times and "real" temperaments of these famous men and women -- arrogant, exhausted, plagued by fears and insecurities, often physically beset -- they get mired in historic detail and hobble their characters, who become as one-dimensional in their failings as they are so often portrayed in their patriotism. Yes, it's interesting, if a bit gruesome, to see early smallpox vaccinations, but not if the price is rendering Abigail Adams mopey and Thomas Jefferson tedious. Which takes some doing.

Things improve in Episodes 3 and 4, but from the moment it opens, John Adams is passionate only in its determination to deglamorize the American Revolution. We meet our main character as he defends the British troops involved in the famous Boston Massacre, successfully arguing that they were hectored into firing by a group of miscreants intent on setting off a bloody incident. Giamatti's Adams is not likable, nor is he meant to be. Grouchy and vain, principled yet sanctimonious, he abhors the way King George III treats the Colonies, but he will not stoop to acts of violence to protest it (a horrifying sequence involved a man being tarred and feathered bolsters his point quite effectively). It is difficult to figure out what, exactly, John Adams wants, except constant reassurance that he is smarter than the average guy. Certainly it isn't his wife, Abigail (Linney), whose main job seems to be to tease her husband into a better humour by reminding him that his intelligence is so superior he need not be constantly reminding people of it.

Yawn.

The chemistry between Linney and Giamatti is less than zero, even by New England standards, and as for sexual frisson, there is none. It's too bad, not only because John and Abigail are among history's great love stories, but because a little sexiness would have gone a long way in firing things up. With her dimples and sharp chin, Linney makes a very comely Abigail, but she too is laden down with "realism" -- when she isn't getting her children inoculated for smallpox or up to her elbows in mud, she spends far too much time staring out the window, complaining that her husband doesn't write her enough, like some mob-capped desperate housewife.

Eventually, of course, Adams becomes a representative to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, where he is among the first to argue for a complete break with Britain. What precisely has changed his mind, or how this decision has changed him as a man, we will never know, because Giamatti portrays Adams with grim consistency as more irritated than passionate, more concerned with his standing among his peers in history than in the creation of democracy.

It is hard to say a word against Giamatti, because we all loved him so much in Sideways, yet he never quite captures the complexities of his subject. Yes, it is true that Adams was arrogant and testy, but he was also witty, passionate and compelling, a man who could, and did, persuade people to do things they didn't want to do. Like start a revolution. Of that Adams, we get only the rarest glimpse. Giamatti has the tantrums, the principles and the self-absorption down pat, but he never finds the divine spark. It's as if he is loath to play Adams as a leading man, despite the name of the miniseries.

Indeed, a strange flatness permeates the entire cast and certainly that Congress. With Wilkinson trying to decide whether Ben Franklin was a vaudevillian or a canny politico, and Stephen Dillane's Jefferson given nothing much to do, it is hard not to long for the song-and-dance numbers from "1776" just to have something to watch. Only David Morse radiates anything like charisma, but then as George Washington he is allowed to tower and wear a cool uniform (though I'm not sure what's up with his mouth -- is he going for the false teeth thing?). Things pick up a bit in the third episode when Adams goes to France, where his Yankee frankness is not appreciated (and a bloodier revolution is still a few years away), and then as he takes his place in the nascent government. Giamatti's air of resigned irritation makes more sense at this point, and the narrative becomes more concerned with actual story than making certain that you, slothful television viewer, feel the proper gratitude for being a citizen of the 21st century.

There are, of course, some wonderful and moving moments in the first and second episodes. The confused exhilaration after the battles at Lexington and Concord, the what-now? silence that falls over the Congress when the Declaration has passed, the smoky glare of the Battle of Bunker Hill viewed from the Adamses' farm -- these images beautifully capture both the mundane and the extraordinary and how they conspired to make history. In those moments you see what the film-makers were striving for and may make John Adams worth watching, severe disappointment notwithstanding.

Certainly no one could argue with the production values. If John Adams doesn't make you feel like you-are-there (in Colonial Boston, aboard a heaving ship, among the doomed French aristos), then you need a bigger TV. But for such a glorious production to work true magic, you have to want to be there. And the roiling implacable gut-wrenching force of desire is something this "John Adams" strangely, and sorely, lacks.

Further reading: John Adams gives the overlooked president his due; John Adams brims with life and texture; Starring as Boston: Virginia; Blowhard, Patriot, President; Dear(est) Abby; John Adams, second to none

Using a Founding Father to promote art of letter-writing

HBO and the Postal Service are joining forces for the first time to co-sponsor a multimillion-dollar multimedia campaign that is intended to evoke the pleasures of sitting right down and writing yourself — or anyone — a letter. The campaign promotes John Adams, the seven-part mini-series scheduled to begin on the cable network on Sunday. The campaign includes television, print, online, retail and promotional elements.

The campaign, by the Civic Entertainment Group in New York, seeks to demonstrate what it calls the “power of the letter,” which is also the U.R.L. for a special Postal Service Web site that is a central element of the campaign. The Web site is the work of AKQA, which was recently named digital agency of the year by the trade publication Adweek. The website from HBO devoted to the mini-series also directs visitors to the Postal Service’s letter site, and the campaign also appears on the main Postal Service website as well as on placards and posters in post offices around the country. The cost of the campaign- estimated at $5 million to $10 million- is being footed by HBO, as part of Time Warner.

The inspiration for the campaign — and the Postal Service’s involvement — is the reputation of Adams and his wife, Abigail, as prolific letter writers. They exchanged more than 1,100 letters from 1762 until 1801, dating from their courtship through his presidency. Indeed, in the Broadway and movie versions of the musical “1776,” the songs sung by the actors playing John and Abigail Adams were based on the contents of their letters. The campaign is indicative of a couple of trends. One is the growing willingness of marketers — including media companies like Time Warner, which make entertainment products — to look beyond conventional outlets for their sales pitches.

The campaign to encourage viewers to watch John Adams includes commercials on television and in movie theaters, as well as outdoor advertising and newspapers ads. But the Postal Service offered an "opportunity to extend communication beyond traditional advertising platforms, on a scope and scale that’s pretty broad and impressive," said Zach Enterlin, vice president for advertising and promotion at HBO in New York. "We have a presence in almost 13,000 locations," he added, referring to the posters and placards in the post offices. And the cancellation marks promoting the mini-series are to appear on more than three billion pieces of mail. Mr. Enterlin played down any perceptions of the Postal Service as old-fashioned or low-tech, calling it "a national institution with a great legacy."

The other trend that the campaign epitomizes is the increasing eagerness of organizations like the Postal Service to consider teaming up with corporate partners. For decades, such deals were off-limits, particularly when the Postal Service was part of the presidential cabinet as the United States Post Office. More recently, the Postal Service has affiliated with marketers that include Pillsbury, for a tie-in campaign selling holiday stamps, and the film-maker George Lucas, for a "Star Wars" campaign that featured mailboxes designed to look like R2-D2. The partnership with HBO "is the most elaborate" of those the Postal Service has agreed to, said Joyce Carrier — yes, that is her real name — who is the manager for channel advertising at the Postal Service in Washington. "The more we thought about it, the more we thought, ‘This is a great opportunity,’" she added. "HBO is a wonderful brand and the cast is first-class."

Pun intended. The cast of John Adams is led by Paul Giamatti as Adams and Laura Linney as Abigail. Other cast members include David Morse, Sarah Polley and Tom Wilkinson.



HBO will begin John Adams with two back-to-back episodes. The remaining five episodes are to be shown each Sunday from March 23 through April 20. Each episode will be rerun several times, as is the practice at HBO. They will also be shown on a sibling network, HBO2.

The Frog Prince

Paul Giamatti’s John Adams is no swashbuckler, but the HBO show rises like a hot-air balloon says New York Magazine's John Leonard...

Short, fat, and cranky were the adjectives that came to David McCullough’s mind when he was asked to describe the hero of his Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of our very first vice-president. As brilliant as John Adams may have been, he was nowhere near the American masculine ideal of a cowboy or a quarterback. Still, how many of our Founding Fathers can we realistically expect to have looked as matinee melancholy and romantic as Thomas Jefferson? And we needed every one of that extraordinary bunch, from cracker-barrel Ben Franklin to narcoleptic George Washington, to dream up and nail down the nascent republic.

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Adams, in the seven-part HBO mini-series adapted from McCullough, is played by Paul Giamatti and therefore looks mostly like a frog. For those of us who remember George Grizzard as the farmer-lawyer from Massachusetts in the thirteen-part The Adams Chronicles on public television 32 years ago, or William Daniels singing and prancing through the Continental Congress in the musical 1776, this takes some getting used to, especially considering how often Giamatti must doff and don his wig, as if to telegraph with blinding light from a bald dome. Perhaps we are being asked to see Adams through the indulgent eyes of his wife, Abigail. Since Abigail is played by Laura Linney, there can be no better vantage. Anyone who’s dipped into the thousand letters that passed between John and Abigail during their 54 years of marriage knows that Abigail was at least as smart as James Madison. Anyone familiar with Linney knows that she can be as smart as the situation needs—and simultaneously exasperated.

We’re in excellent company, from the Boston Massacre to the Declaration of Independence to Adams’s plenipotentiary missions to Versailles and the Court of St. James to his unsought but extremely gratifying vice-presidency in the first Washington administration. As Jefferson, Stephen Dillane broods upon liberty with a gothic passion. Tom Wilkinson’s Franklin fills us with impatience and intends to. David Morse as George W. seems taxidermic, a huge stuffed squirrel of secrets. Zeljko Ivanek as the Pennsylvania delegate John Dickinson makes a remarkably eloquent case for Quaker pacifism. Scriptwriter Kirk Ellis (Into the West) and director Tom Hooper (Longford) are equally interested in ideas and personalities. And their camera, whether on location in Colonial Williamsburg or in Budapest pretending to be Paris, likes to point as much at peach trees, bullet molds, smallpox victims, and warships as it does at French gardens, despondent faces, and flags like bloody bandages. On one gruesome hand, the tarring and feathering of a British officer; on another, the thrilling levitation from Paris of the Montgolfiers’ hot-air balloon.

When this balloon goes up, a skeptical Adams turns rapturous. Here is a metaphor for his republic. You may recall that Simon Schama, in his tendentious account of the French Revolution, Citizens, also made hot-air metaphors out of these eighteenth-century balloons. By establishing a direct, unmediated relationship with enormous multitudes of ordinary French, balloonists robbed Louis XVI of his control of spectacle, injuring the king in his ceremonial mystique. According to Schama, a balloon in the air belonged not to the hierarchical world of the monarch, but to the democratic people. Well, up the republic, with flags and flutes for this worthy mini-series, too. Yet as we watch, we’d do well to remember the words of the late Molly Ivins, who once suggested, “It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America.” No doubt the equally estimable Abigail Adams and Laura Linney would both agree.

John Adams starts March 16 on HBO.

A bold new interpretation of The Passion

Jesus is a salt-of-the-earth northerner, Mary Magdalene is not a prostitute – oh, and we got the crucifixion all wrong. Welcome to the BBC’s new interpretation of the Passion says Garry Jenkins...

Mid-afternoon in the suffocating heat of the Moroccan desert, and a day that began long before dawn is at last building to its climax. On a ridge, overlooking a rugged, rock-strewn valley, a swarm of make-up artists, costume-fitters and prosthetics experts are applying the finishing touches to the loincloth-clad figure of the actor Joseph Mawle. Nearby, in-between swigs from small bottles of mineral water, a quartet of red-robed Roman centurions is rehearsing hauling upright the crude, T-shaped gibbet to which the young Englishman is about to be attached.

Until now the day has been bedevilled by small technical hitches that have put back filming. Mawle, facing the biggest challenge of his young acting career, portraying Jesus’s crucifixion at Golgotha, has been up since 3am. So when, a few moments later, the last-minute adjustments are complete and the call for quiet and then action finally goes out, the sense of excitement is mixed with a palpable sense of relief. Hundreds of hours of preparation and planning, both here in Morocco and back in the UK, are about to come to fruition. Or so it seems.

Seconds after the cameras turn over for the first time, a sudden gust of desert wind throws thick, red dust up into the eyes of Mawle and the centurions. Within moments tripods, chairs and other bits of equipment are being picked up and thrown over by stinging blasts of air. As all eyes turn heavenwards, a bank of dense, livid, purple and grey clouds is settling above the scene, obscuring even the vast Atlas Mountains in the distance. Soon fat gobbets of rain are turning the dusty landscape a dark, muddy brown, sending everyone running for cover. Minutes later, with the storm growing in intensity, filming is postponed.

At least producer Nigel Stafford-Clark hasn’t lost his desert-dry sense of humour. "There are times when I wonder whether I’ve walked into the Book of Job. This definitely feels more like it belongs in the Old Testament rather than the New one," he says, huddled under a makeshift tent, looking up at the unruly heavens with a world-weary smile. "I do feel like having a conversation with God and saying, ‘Come on, we’re trying to tell this story, give us a break.’"

Stafford-Clark and his team are here in southern Morocco, near the town of Ouarzazate, to film an ambitious new, three-hour version of the Passion, the story of Jesus’s last week on Earth. Despite the fact that it is summer, this is the second time in a week that the production has been thrown by the capricious Moroccan weather. Last week, plans to film Jesus’s arrest by the Romans in the Garden of Gethsemane were wrecked by a sudden and unexpected flash flood. "It was extraordinary. One day this place looked like it hadn’t seen rain for centuries, the next it was submerged in water that was roaring down from the mountains," says Stafford-Clark.

Stoicism is the television producer’s stock in trade, but rarely can it have been required in such quantities. Encounters with biblical storms are far from the first tests Stafford-Clark and his production team have faced. Given the bold, brave and potentially controversial approach they are taking to retelling the story of Jesus’s final days, they are also unlikely to be the last.

The BBC conceived a new version of the Passion, to be broadcast episodically at prime time on BBC1 over four nights through Easter Week, more than a year and a half ago. The appetite for Biblical stories had been proved by the enormous box office success of Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ. Stafford-Clark, who had just brought the acclaimed Bleak House to television in a similar format, sensed an opportunity to breathe new life into the subject.

"I had just watched Pasolini’s Gospel According to St Matthew, which I’d loved when I’d seen it in the Sixties," he says, by now safely installed in his office at the nearby Atlas film studios, which have become his base. "It is the only successful version I’ve seen of this story. The big American epics in the Fifties, and even the Zeffirelli version with Robert Powell back in the Seventies, were all very reverential. They all made you feel as if you were looking at it through a plate glass window, as if there was a distance between you and what was going on," he says. "It always felt like King Arthur or Lord of the Rings, as if these events took place in a vacuum."

Stafford-Clark wanted to ground the story in reality for the first time. "It’s billed as the greatest story ever told and in many ways it is. But in terms of storytelling it never seemed to make a lot of sense. Watching all these other versions, I didn’t understand what Palm Sunday was all about, for instance. He was just a humble preacher from Galilee. Why all this excitement? Why did the high priest react the way he did in condemning Jesus to death? Why did Pilate do what he did? When you are given the story normally, all these things have to be taken for granted. They are part of what you are told. I felt there was a chance to remedy that."

The key, for him, was to create a drama that allows the audience to feel as if they were in the thick of the action 2,000 years ago. "If you had been in Jerusalem in AD32 you would have witnessed this. You would have seen the crowds, the excitement of his arrival, you’d have got wind of what was going on in the temple. And then you’d have heard rumours that he’d been arrested,” he says. “It’s something that actually happened. This is the thing we are trying to get across."

The first challenge was to find a writer capable of evoking the turbulent, chaotic political melting pot that was first-century Judaea. He appeared in the unlikely form of the Emmy-winning, Irish-born writer Frank Deasy, best-known for hard-hitting contemporary dramas like Real Men, about child abuse, and Looking After Jo Jo, set in the world of Scottish drug gangs. Deasy’s fast-moving, episodic script shows the tumultuous events of Passover week in Jerusalem from the perspective of all those who took part in it, not just Jesus and his disciples, but Pontius Pilate, the Romans and the Jewish temple authorities too. "As a dramatist, the big challenge was to evoke a world in which this story has not taken place, a world without Jesus or any Christian churches or any of the Christian concepts that are so familiar to us," he explains.

As well as reading the Gospels and conducting his own research, Deasy spoke to Professor Mark Goodacre, a leading New Testament scholar at Duke University in North Carolina, who was engaged as a historical consultant to the series. It allowed him to add dramatic depth – and potentially controversy – to the orthodox version of the story. Deasy was determined that every character had a story of his or her own. "By the end I hope people feel they have been on a very deep journey with these characters, that they feel they have shared the most powerful week of their life. So everyone had to have a motive that we could understand, a logical psychology to the things that they do," he explains.

As a result, for instance, Mary Magdalene, played by Paloma Baeza, is portrayed not as a prostitute but as a woman who is, effectively, one of Jesus’s sponsors. "There is increasing evidence that she was a wealthy widow who supported Jesus’s campaign. As he emerged from Galilee, he needed backing," says Deasy.

Pontius Pilate, played by James Nesbitt, is also revealed in a new light, as a career soldier posted to one of the most troublesome outposts of the Roman Empire. "We see him as a man with a wife and a career and a villa in Rome to worry about," says Deasy. "Again I wanted his decisions to be plausible. He’s a guy managing a career and a volatile political situation. I think Pilate is an interesting contemporary figure. You can almost view the current situation with the Western powers in Iraq or Afghanistan in the things Pilate says. He is someone who is dealing with people with huge convictions about things that mean very little to him and he is trying to impose order," he says.

The character who emerges from the shadows of history most strongly in this version of the story is the high priest of Jerusalem’s temple, Caiaphas. In most versions of the story the man who condemns Jesus to death at the hands of the Romans is a one-dimensional figure, the most identifiable bad guy. Through his research, however, Deasy began to see a man who was part priest, part politician, a leader who was faced with keeping a lid on the cauldron of intrigue and insurrection that was Jerusalem during the biggest festival of the year, Passover. So when Jesus appears in Jerusalem, fulfilling an ancient prophesy that the Messiah will arrive on a donkey through the city’s eastern gate, Deasy’s Caiaphas, played by Ben Daniels, is motivated not by bloodlust, but by the need to protect his people from the violence the Romans routinely meted out when tensions rose within the city. "I became more and more fascinated by Caiaphas," Deasy says. "He is usually a cartoon villain. But he is trying to protect his world for noble reasons. He loves his people and his family. By going down a very human route with Caiaphas it led me into really interesting dramatic territory."

At the heart of the drama, of course, is Jesus himself. Like Stafford-Clark, Deasy wanted to move away from the image of an otherwordly figure. "In so many other treatments Jesus is pure, floating on a cloud 2ft above the ground," he says. "He has to emerge as a person to other living people."

The key to this was giving him a voice that was rooted in the world, something Deasy found in an unexpected place. "I was struggling, so I talked to a friend of mine who is a priest. Every day he makes these concepts fresh to a contemporary audience so I asked him how he did it. He gave me a really simple piece of advice," he explains. "He said to think of Jesus as coming from Newcastle, as a working-class man from the north of Palestine who speaks Aramaic to fishermen and peasants, who comes to London where people speak Hebrew and are more educated. And he starts to preach the Gospel. He has got to use words that are quite simple, clear and rough at times. He has to explain concepts like redemption, righteousness, forgiveness, in plain, everyday language. This idea of Jesus coming from a real place worked. After that I found a voice for him that was easy and conversational, simple, without being patronising."

Perhaps the boldest decision Deasy made was the last one. The final episode of the six-part drama depicts the resurrection of Jesus in a way that is open to individual interpretation. In keeping with the Gospels, he reappears to his former friends in different ways, leaving them to decide what it is they have seen.

"A lot of accounts skip the resurrection," Deasy says. "We have followed the different gospel accounts faithfully. There are lengthy discussions among the disciples about what it means. They are the conversations we would have today in the light of an event like that. It resolves itself in that there is a resurrection of hope among the disciples. There’s a sense of new life, that suffering has been transformed into something meaningful. The extent of what that means as a viewer is up to you."

While Deasy was completing his script, Stafford-Clark was turning his attention to filming. When he decided to shoot in Morocco during summer, director Michael Offer thought he was crazy. "The old phrase about mad dogs and Englishmen sprang to mind," laughs the Australian director. "The heat has been challenging, particularly for the actors wearing beards and robes."

The Atlas film studios have been a favourite location for film-makers from David Lean to Ridley Scott, who filmed sequences for Gladiator here. Every aspect of The Passion’s look was carefully researched. For instance, production designer Simon Elliott and his team went to great lengths to ensure that the last supper was an authentic meal from the Judaea of the time. "The Passover lamb eaten during the festival would be part of the meal, along with herbs and green vegetables," says Elliott. "There were dates and raisins and unleavened bread and a sausage made of honey and dates."

In a similar vein, Elliott and his team tried to recreate the crucifixion as realistically as possible. Historical evidence suggests that Jesus would have been nailed to the cross in a way that is at odds with the image that has dominated Christian iconography for 2,000 years. "There has only ever been one archaeological find of a crucified skeleton, in Palestine in the Sixties," explains Elliott. "The body was in a slightly different position to the classic one, with the legs tucked up and under. Historians think it shows the crucifixion was fiendishly designed. If you could bear the pain of having the nails driven through your ankles you could take the weight and lift up your chest. But if you were put in a position where you couldn’t lift yourself up you died of asphyxia – you were basically suffocated. That’s the reason they broke your legs, so you would very quickly suffocate."

If the burden of retelling the greatest story ever told was heavy for the production team, however, it was greater still for the man chosen to portray Jesus. A relatively little known actor, acclaimed for his work in the BBC2 drama Soundproof and most recently seen in the gay drama Clapham Junction, Joseph Mawle was Stafford-Clark and Offer’s first choice for the role. He admits he has found it hard and lonely work. "It is incredibly daunting," he says. "It is in some ways the biggest role you can take on. There were times I got quite shaky about it and thought, I’m really scared, to be quite honest with you. If we don’t like Jesus, then we are in trouble."

The key, he says, has been to play him as flesh and blood. "He was a man. No two ways about it. The only way I could approach him was not as a god, but as a man," he says. He has, he admits, been particularly wary of the crucifixion scene. "I am pretty scared about it. I want to get it as right as possible, to play the reality as much as possible and to tell the story as best as possible."

Frustratingly, however, he will not be doing it today. As word comes through that filming has been abandoned for the day, Mawle heads off to begin preparing to film an interior scene at the studios.

Nigel Stafford-Clark, meanwhile, is in his office, anticipating battles much further down the line. Aware of the scrutiny that the film will get, both here and in the US where the BBC’s co-financier, HBO, will show the drama, he has already begun dialogue with the Christian community. "We have told them what we are doing," he says. "It’s very important that it doesn’t come as a shock to people, particularly to those for whom it is the most important story in their lives. The reaction has been very positive."

He is too old and wise a hand to expect it to avoid controversy completely. When he made Bleak House he had to field complaints from the Dickens Society and, faced with a rather broader constituency this time, he is braced for criticism again. He is unapologetic about the approach he and his team have taken, however. "My job is telling stories. The fact that it is the backbone of one of the world’s great religions is what, for me, has stopped it being told properly as a story before because people back away from it. It’s not just a story that is told in churches. It really happened," he says.

"Our version is not remotely controversial. There is no attempt to twist anything – you don’t see Jesus sleeping with Mary Magdalene or anything like that. We have tried to make it feel like it is really happening. And because you understand why people are behaving the way they are, what Jesus is doing becomes even more extraordinary."

"With the world the way it is at the moment," he continues, "anything that is about something that goes beyond your everyday existence is of value. People are looking for something beyond their new car. Telling a story like this quenches that thirst. It makes you feel there is something beyond your own limited existence."

And with that he leaves his office to head back out towards the set – checking nervously for the arrival of another Biblical storm.

The Passion begins on BBC1 on Sunday, March 16, and continues throughout Easter week

Further reading: A new passion;