Peter Krause on Dirty Sexy Money

Peter Krause tells Benji Wilson about playing the role of an altruistic lawyer to Donald Sutherland's corrupt family in Dirty Sexy Money.

Something of a Faustian journey’ is how Peter Krause describes his role in Dirty Sexy Money, Channel 4’s new US drama series, which starts on Friday. This is a significant understatement – Faust merely made a pact with the Devil. Krause’s character Nick George makes a pact with the Darling family, and that, he soon learns, is much more complicated.

An amalgam of the Kennedys, the Hiltons and the Osbournes, the Darlings – who are the richest family in New York City – will soon become the most monstrous family on television. Patriarch Tripp Darling (an imperious Donald Sutherland) is as close to a functioning human being as the clan possesses. The rest of them forcibly insert the filthy into filthy rich. Tripp’s wayward scions include Patrick (William Baldwin), who’s running for Senator while seeing a transsexual lover; Reverend Brian (Glenn Fitzgerald), a Torquemada-style man of the cloth; the giggling, vacuous twins Jeremy and Juliet (Seth Gabel and Samaire Armstrong); and the serial divorcee Karen (Natalie Zea).

Nick enters their charmed circle because his father Dutch had been their lawyer. The young Nick thus grows up with a healthy contempt for mammon, instead becoming a do-gooder attorney with a stock of pro bono clients.

But when Dutch is killed in a mysterious plane crash, Nick finds himself drawn back into the Darlings’ affairs by an offer of $10million a year to spend on his good works, and the chance to find out what happened to his father. Minutes after accepting, he’s on his way to bail out Jeremy, who’s just ‘won’ a yacht full of illegal immigrants on an all-night poker binge.

As the title suggests, there is enough glitz and intrigue in Dirty Sexy Money to bring back memories of the Eighties heyday of US imports such as Dynasty and Dallas. But since then, American television has upped its game and the boundaries of comedy, drama and soap have been eroded by smart hybrids such as Desperate Housewives. Dirty Sexy Money straddles every genre – it has unashamedly madcap plotlines (for example, Reverend Brian passing off his illegitimate son as a Swedish orphan), it’s got more complexity than a sitcom, and it’s funnier than a drama.

Even so, the casting of Krause is a surprise. Krause (it rhymes with ‘wowser’) turned down the role three times because, he says, ‘I was terrified of the show being successful and having to do it for seven years. I have commitment issues.’

His commitment issues arise from the fact that programmes with Krause in the lead have a habit of succeeding. After two years playing a television presenter in Aaron Sorkin’s much underrated Sports Night, he went on to five award-laden series of Six Feet Under, one of American television’s recent highpoints.

When that finished in 2005, Krause went off-piste. Rather than cashing in with, say, an action movie, he starred in a controversial indie film about America’s post-9/11 paranoia called Civic Duty (‘I got accused both of being anti-American and also a real right-wing American’) and then a science-fiction miniseries, The Lost Room. Craig Wright, who wrote some of the standout episodes of Six Feet Under, convinced him to return to series television.

‘Craig’s aim here was to conduct an exploration of wealth while providing an entertaining show,’ says Krause. ‘Craig has created a very complicated psychological world. In life, Nick’s father was practically dead to him already. He doesn’t want to see him. He doesn’t want to talk to him. Then when he dies, out of guilt he feels that he should be responsible for finding out whether something did happen to his father.’

In Six Feet Under, a drama about a family of undertakers, Krause’s character Nate had repeated imaginary interaction with his dead father and ended up – reluctantly – doing his job. Dirty Sexy Money has no dream sequences, but it does have a similar love-hate father-son dynamic.

‘I think that’s a universal theme – the desire to differentiate yourself from your parents,’ says Krause. ‘If there’s something in your father that strikes you negatively, then you say, “I am not going to be that way.” I was the same – I didn’t want to become my father. And yet you find yourself magnetically being drawn towards those very things which you so abhor.’

Wright has said he created Nick with Krause in mind. That’s quite a compliment – Nick is unfailingly altruistic, the model of probity. But Krause suggests that Nick will not prove beyond reproach. ‘This show wants to ask some very basic questions,’ he says, ‘such as, do the ends justify the means? Does power corrupt? And along the way, we’ll have fun exploring human desire, what people want, and how we foolishly go about getting it.’

Dirty Sexy Money is on Channel 4 on Friday, 21 March at 9.00pm

Further reading: William Baldwin talks...

Last toast is drunk to Summer Wine's Foggy

Brian Wilde, the quiet co-star of the television comedy classics Porridge and Last of the Summer Wine, has died aged 80. The actor’s son Andrew said that his father had died in his sleep of natural causes at a nursing home on Wednesday night. He had suffered a fall about seven weeks ago and had not recovered. Wilde’s agent, Nick Young, said: “He will be sadly missed by family and colleagues alike. He brought a great deal of laughter into everyone’s lives over the course of his career.”

After a long and busy though largely anonymous career as a supporting actor, Brian Wilde emerged in the 1970s to create two of the most enduring characters of situation comedy: the prison officer Barrowclough in Porridge and the former army corporal Foggy Dewhurst in Last of the Summer Wine.

In Porridge's Slade Prison, which gave him a happy refuge of sorts from an overbearing wife, Barrowclough was a beacon of decency, preferring to see the best in everyone but far too gullible to detect the scams of the inmates led by Ronnie Barker's Fletcher. He was the ideal comic foil to his fellow warder, the draconian Mr Mackay.

The rudiments of the Barrowclough character were in the brilliant scripts of Dick Clement and Ian Le Frenais but the writers were the first to acknowledge Wilde's skill in giving him flesh. Much the same could be said of Foggy, devised by Roy Clarke to replace Michael Bates's Blamire in the trio of elderly adolescents whose inconsequential wanderings lay at the heart of Last of the Summer Wine.

With his trademark deerstalker and flourishing a cane, Foggy tried to bring a touch of military discipline to his old school chums, the quietly philosophical Clegg (Peter Sallis) and the grubby, disreputable Compo (Bill Owen). Not only did his carefully laid schemes come to nothing but despite his army training he was no more successful than the others in withstanding the verbal (and sometimes physical) assaults of the show's ferocious women.

Although sharply delineated by Wilde's playing of them, the characters were both distinguished by failure. The difference, as Wilde himself put it, was that while Barrowclough was a failure and admitted it, Foggy was a failure and didn't know it. Wilde put some of his success as a comedy actor down to his lanky physique. He was tall (6ft 3in) but weighed only 13 stone. Another asset was a fastidious delivery, in which every syllable was carefully enunciated.

Born in Lancashire, only 15 miles from Holmfirth, the West Yorkshire location for Last of the Summer Wine, Wilde made his first film and television appearances in the early 1950s, though some were too small to be credited. For the next 20 years or so, until Porridge brought him national recognition, he was seldom out of work but far from being a household name.

On television he was in a couple of Francis Durbridge thrillers and the ITV sitcom, The Love of Mike (1960), in which he played the flatmate of Mike the hero, a philandering dance band trumpeter (Michael Medwin). During the 1960s he appeared with Tony Hancock and in episodes of popular dramas such as The Man in Room 17, The Avengers and the science fiction series Out of the Unknown.

Gradually the parts became more substantial. In 1966 he played the personnel manager trying to sort out a group of maintenance men on the fiddle in Room at the Bottom, the first sitcom from the team of John Esmonde and Bob Larbey. In 1970 he took over from John Woodvine as Bloody Delilah, the depot boss, in The Dustbinmen, an earthy comedy about refuse collectors created by Jack Rosenthal.

Although Wilde had most success with comedy, he could also show a sinister side, as when, dressed in black, he played Topcliffe, the royal torturer, in Elizabeth R. Wilde was first seen as Barrowclough in a pilot called Prisoner and Escort, which was shown in 1973 and became Porridge in the following year. He joined Last of the Summer Wine in 1976 after Michael Bates had left through ill-health and stayed until 1985.

These were probably the best years of the series, which celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2003. Wilde was the last to take any personal credit but the chemistry between the three main characters often reached perfection and the audience, which had grown slowly, soared to 18 million.

At the same time Wilde's prickly relationship with his co-star, Bill Owen, became well known. Wilde admitted that they had disagreements over the interpretation of scenes or the cutting of dialogue, and added that “we've never walked off the set in anger - we're too professional for that - though we have a few days when we're not talking”. They also disagreed politically, with Owen, the staunch socialist, having little time for the views of the Tory-leaning Wilde.

In 1983 Wilde declined to appear in a stage version of Last of the Summer Wine, though he insisted that this was because of reservations about the play rather than friction between himself and Owen. Two years later he left the television series, saying that he wanted to do other things. One of these, Wyatt's Watchdogs (1988), gave Wilde the first leading role of his career as a retired soldier (not unlike Foggy) trying to run a neighbourhood watch group. But it was poorly received and lasted for only six episodes.

By 1990 Wilde was back in Last of the Summer Wine and he played Foggy until 1997 when he was forced to drop out because of an attack of shingles. He recovered, but another character, played by Frank Thornton, was created in his place and this time the break from the series was permanent.

Wilde was a private and diffident man, who gave little away in his rare interviews and made no attempt to exploit the fame and accolades which his two high-profile comedy characters had brought him.

He is survived by his wife, Eva Stuart, an actress, and their son and daughter.

Brian Wilde, actor, was born on June 13, 1927. He died on March 19, 2008, aged 80

He Kills Coppers

The latest TV adaptation of a Jake Arnott novel takes viewers back to a notorious Sixties killing reports James Rampton...

For David Bowie, everything about crime novelist Jake Arnott's work is hunky dory. The musician comments that, "whenever he's got a new book out, I drop everything, knowing that the next couple of hours are going to be pure gangland bliss." Like Bowie, TV producers tend to drop everything when a new Arnott novel comes out. Following on from the acclaimed BBC2 dramatisation of The Long Firm in 2004, ITV1 is now bringing to the screen a three-part interpretation of He Kills Coppers, Arnott's next slice of "pure gangland bliss."

Adrian Shergold's absorbing, beautifully-shot drama spans 20 years. Adapted by Ed Whitmore, previously responsible for Hallam Foe and Waking the Dead, the serial kicks off in 1966 London and is set against the backdrop of the celebrations for England's World Cup victory. (Further episodes take place in 1971 and 1985). The period is immaculately recreated – everyone smokes and smears on Brylcreem like it's going out of fashion and, at one point, a character walks past a poster on a wall that says "Drinka Pinta Milka Day".

The drama intertwines the stories of two morally ambiguous characters, career policeman Frank Taylor (played by Rafe Spall) and career criminal Billy Porter (Mel Raido). Taylor pursues Porter across the decades after Porter guns down three police officers, including Taylor's close friend and incorruptible colleague, Jonathan Young (Liam Garrigan). Taylor's distraught reaction on arriving at the scene of the triple murder is hauntingly filmed in slo-mo, to the plangent accompaniment of Dusty Springfield's If You Go Away.

I'm on the set of He Kills Coppers. It's a chilly morning and we're in a goods yard on the outskirts of Maidenhead where a traditional steam fair stores its attractions during the winter. Porter has been hiding out here with a group of travellers, and we're watching him paint a skull on the side of one of their fairground lorries.

In his caravan between scenes, Spall underlines that Arnott's writing readily lends itself to the screen. "He Kills Coppers is the only book I've ever read in one sitting. I literally couldn't put it down," enthuses the actor, who is also to be seen playing Dennis Heymer, the lover of Frankie Howerd (David Walliams), in BBC4's bio-pic, Frankie Howerd: Rather You Than Me. "Jake Arnott is a very special writer – he makes it look so easy. He has this beautiful, succinct, sexy style of writing that translates seamlessly to television. My favourite writer is Charles Bukowski, and he and Arnott have the same sparseness and clearness. Arnott is – for want of a better phrase – the best top-end pulp writer there is."

David Boulter, the producer of He Kills Coppers, chips in: "Arnott's writing is so rich. This is not only a thriller, it's a social chronicle that plays out over 20 years. This is a piece that transcends the boundaries of the crime genre. That's a really hard thing to do. But Arnott's characters are so believable that you completely forget you're in a crime drama and are drawn into a human drama instead. That's when it becomes truly compelling."

Arnott was inspired by the real-life case of Harry Roberts. In 1966, he and his accomplices shot dead three Met officers in the "massacre of Braybrook Street" in West London – still the worst peacetime slaughter of policemen in this country. Like Porter, Roberts was a veteran of the Malayan Emergency and used his military training to hide out in Epping Forest. Despite the largest manhunt in British police history, he escaped capture for three months. Roberts is still inside and is now one of the longest-serving prisoners in the UK.

A decade or so after Roberts's crime, Arnott was shocked to hear football hooligans taunting police with the terrace chant, sung to the tune of "London Bridge is Falling Down": "Harry Roberts is our friend, is our friend, is our friend. Harry Roberts is our friend, he kills coppers". The police had by the 1970s become so reviled that Roberts was transformed from cult demon to cult hero.

The film-makers say that, more than 40 years later, Roberts' crime still has the power to shock. "Even today," Boulter reflects, "if someone shot dead three police officers in cold blood and in broad daylight in Shepherd's Bush, there'd be a public outcry. In 1966, an era of far greater deference to the police, it was unthinkable. At the time, the rope had just been abolished, and Roberts was the first murderer not to swing.

"Roy Jenkins, the Home Secretary, had to explain to the public why he was not going to hang. Then football hooligans started to chant 'Harry Roberts is our friend,' in order to wind up the police and spark a riot. That moment, when Roberts was turned into a folk hero, really was a low point in our society."

He Kills Coppers also charts the changing nature of our relationship with the police between the 1960s and 1980s. Boulter, who has also produced Prime Suspect, The Forsyte Saga and EastEnders, continues that, "up until 1966, we had had this image of the police as Dixon of Dock Green, the friendly neighbourhood bobby on the beat. All that changed during the 1970s and 1980s.

"The nadir was reached when there was the Battle of Orgreave during the Miners' Strike in 1984 and then the Battle of the Beanfield the following year. That was when the police violently stopped a group of hippies getting to Stonehenge for a summer solstice party. It was a disgraceful day. I've seen the ITN footage from that clash, and it still makes me angry. Women holding infants were pulled off buses and beaten with truncheons. The police went way over the top. On the back of Orgreave, they were under Government orders to stop the peace convoy and stamp out civil disorder. That moment marked the death of the hippie dream.

"By that stage, the police had become an arm of the Thatcherite state. They had also become very militarised. They had dispensed with the theory of trying to control civil disorder peacefully and borrowed the technique from the Hong Kong Military Police of charging at demonstrators on horseback – as they did in the poll-tax riots. That period was when the public really lost confidence in the police. People thought that scenes like the Battle of the Beanfield could never happen in this country. They began to view the police as an army of occupation."

The other aspect of policing that He Kills Coppers highlights is the corruption that became endemic in the Met during the 1970s and 80s. On his first day in the Flying Squad, Taylor is forced by his senior officer to accept a bribe from a gangster. Taylor's boss explains the way it works to the new boy: "We keep the peace and we take a few heavy villains off the pavement every now and then, and the Great British Public sleep soundly in their beds. We deserve a little extra for that, don't we?"

Spall avers that, "in the early 1960s, the British public had an idealised view of the police. But during the 1970s, there was mass corruption throughout the Flying Squad and a load of officers were sacked. Those scandals fundamentally altered our view of the police."

The other area where Arnott excels is in creating immensely plausible characters. He succeeds in conjuring up the coppers and criminals who prowl the smoky Soho clip-joints of the mid-1960s without once straying into Guy Ritchie-style "geezer-land."

The Flying Squad high-flyer Taylor, for example, is not an upright, unimpeachable copper, but a highly questionable figure. As well as accepting bribes, he deceives his supposed best friend Young, steals his girlfriend, a prostitute called Jeannie (Kelly Reilly), and gets him transferred to a post where he gets murdered. As the drunken Taylor rides in a taxi through the jubilant Trafalgar Square crowds revelling in England's World Cup win, he sighs, in the hard-boiled voiceover without which no crime thriller is complete: "They're all singing 'You'll Never Walk Alone'. Do you want a bet? Everyone's happy, delirious. So what's wrong with me?"

Raido, who makes a complex, brooding villain, affirms that nothing is clear-cut in this story of an obsessive, potentially doomed quest for redemption. "There are no 'good' and 'bad' characters in He Kills Coppers – they're all just flawed human beings with their own shortcomings and virtues. One bad act does not define you as a human being. Billy, for instance, is not just a violent psychopath. There is another side to him that has feelings and is very tender towards women and loves art."

The 25-year-old Spall, whose father is Timothy, the star of Auf Wiedersehen Pet, Secrets and Lies and Pierrepoint, says that he is delighted to be appearing in a piece as thought-provoking as He Kills Coppers. "I'm living my dream," beams the young actor. "This is what I've always wanted to do."

The producers say that He Kills Coppers is part of ITV1's drive to produce more challenging drama – a development which Spall applauds. "It's great that ITV1 are doing it," the actor enthuses. "It's something that a few years ago, they wouldn't have done. I was surprised when I heard it was for ITV1. But, then again, in the past couple of years they have made some really brave dramas. Look at Pierrepoint. That was great – although I can't remember who the lead was. Some actor or other!"

He Kills Coppers starts on ITV1 at 9pm on Sunday

The British are coming

A few items I haven't had a chance to cover in depth over the last week...

"The British are coming!", Colin Welland boasted in 1981, holding aloft his Oscar for Chariots of Fire – and given the annual British pirate raids on the Academy Awards, Welland may well have been proved right. Our home-grown thespian takeover of American television, on the other hand, has been an altogether stealthier affair – more like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in fact. Gerard Gilbert reports on how British actresses are leading an invasion on the US, while the Times feature an interview with Lena Headey about her gun-toting role in The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Miraculously none of them appear to have made it onto the bloated US chat show circuit for this coming week.

You can read a round-up of this year's Cranford dominated Bafta nominations here... A report on the trials for the new series of Gladiators on Sky One and a first detailed break-down of the new Apprentice contenders.

A piece about the triumphant return of three CBS comedies, plus Ginia Bellafante's scathing review of Fox's new Canterbury's Law and the Return of Jezebel James. There's also news about a personnel shake-up at HBO as the head of entertainment programming departs.

Finally, the truth of Lost, that metaphysical beacon of our times, seems tantalizingly within reach on certain spoiler Web sites. An extended article in the Washington Post warns that anybody getting too caught up in the quest will discover there's a downside.

Shop till he drops

Snapped, Oxygen Channel’s show about women killing their mates, is gathering a boisterous following notes Hillary Frey...

Last Thursday, I sent an e-mail to my husband, informing him I was on my way home to watch a couple of episodes of Snapped, the show on the Oxygen channel about women who kill their husbands.

He shot back: “So by the time I get home, you’ll have the knife sharpened and the big plastic bag all ready to dump my body into?”

Ha. Thanks to Snapped, I’d never be dumb enough to use garbage bags!

Here’s why: As I learned later that night, those innocent-seeming, mass-produced garbage bags jammed under the sink are actually full of incriminating detail. Melanie McGuire, a nurse from New Jersey, was put away for life because of her garbage bags. She killed her husband, dismembered him, put the parts in—you got it!—garbage bags, and then into suitcases and threw them into the ocean. They washed up on the shore in Virginia, near the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. When she went to trial for the murder of her husband, William, the prosecution called a forensics expert who explained that he could tell that the garbage bags containing William’s corpse were from the very same lot as garbage bags detectives found in the McGuire home.

It’s very possible Snapped is one of those shows that flies under your radar. For one, it’s on Oxygen (Is that different from WE? From Lifetime?), which is somewhere in the Middle America of the cable landscape that is so easy to fly over. Although it airs Sundays at 10:30 p.m., it’s a fair bet that many women are watching it during its regular 90 minutes of repeats (three episodes in a row!) between 8 and 9:30 in the morning—just when, across the country, men are heading off to work and kissing their stay-at-home wives goodbye.

One of the show’s fascinations is that many of the murdered husbands don’t fit the abusive, the-bastard-got-what-he-deserved mould. Instead, shopping often seems to be the culprit, so much so that the show’s tag line could almost be, “Shop till he drops.” A stock piece of video footage, showing fancy Madison Avenue-type shoppers with Louis Vuitton and Prada bags slung over their shoulders, makes a regular appearance, to ominous effect. The women’s spending problems sometimes lead to credit card debt, bank fraud and other financial jams that they hide from their husbands. And rather than come clean to their husbands and try to work the issue out with a good financial planner, the women decide for some reason that murdering them is the better, more sensible option. Some claim their partners would’ve beaten them or otherwise abused them if their financial irresponsibility had been revealed, and defend the killing as a sort of last-ditch self-defence manoeuvre. Others hope to get insurance money to pay their creditors. Or take Melanie McGuire and her tell-tale garbage bags: She killed her husband in order to avoid a messy divorce and custody battle over her two children. The fact that a murder trial would likely be a bit more inconvenient than a divorce or custody case doesn’t seem to have occurred to her.

Often enough, it’s not fancy clothes but bar tabs and modest home furnishings and a few nice things that get these women in trouble. Their stories are from small towns and suburbs across the Midwest and South and South-west. The footage of their small depressed towns and strip malls can make a viewer sympathetic to a woman who longs for a new or different life.

If a show like The Wire makes you want to be a detective, catching the bad guys and boozing it up at shabby watering holes, Snapped captures the often slow and frustrating pace of crime-solving, as well as the darker corners of America where local officers are busting their friends and neighbours, not big, bad drug dealers and serial killers. Law and Order, CSI and all the other prime-time crime shows have taught us to think we know what to look for and expect when it comes to catching a killer. But in real life, the blood spatters and bullet trajectories aren’t always the clues that ultimately convict.

Snapped is not a flashy show; to tell its stories of women who kill, the show relies on long exterior shots of police stations and family homes, and many sit-down interviews with law enforcement officers, friends and family members of the victims and perpetrators. And the show absolutely luxuriates in 80’s-style, Unsolved Mysteries-bad-re-enactment glory, with liberal use of shadow, slo-mo and, when the situation calls for it, fuzzy embraces between lingerie-clad women and muscled men. What often results is the jarring juxtaposition of a blurred, kitschy re-enactment followed by an actual, stomach-turning crime photo of a blood-spattered, gunshot corpse, still wearing pjamas or K-Mart underwear.

The motives behind Snapped are difficult to tease out. Does the show, currently in its seventh season, instruct women in how to off their partners?

It’s shocking, really, how simple it actually is. For example, you don’t need a gun. A woman named Lynn Turner poisoned not one, but two of her partners with antifreeze, and nearly got away with it. (The symptoms induced by ethylene glycol mimic those of flu.) Another woman, Sandy Murphy, who was not ultimately convicted of murder, might have faked her husband’s drug overdose with some Xanax and heroin. “Most of the women that we profiled, they are facing problems that women all over the country are facing—economic, marital, custody battles—and we are seeing how they are dealing with the problems,” said Deborah Dawkins, a supervising producer of Snapped whose company, Jupiter Entertainment, also produces the new Oxygen show Captured. “But for them, they are so into the moment of desperation, they make a choice that we don’t make.”

Asked whether the show is empowering for women in some way, Ms. Dawkins and her producing partner, Donna Dudek, demurred. But they admitted that the show can, in some instances, rally the sisters. A woman named Kimberly Cunningham, upon learning that her brother-in-law had raped her daughter, drove to his job and shot him so many times that she needed to reload the gun halfway through her spree. It was impossible not to feel for a mother protecting her daughter. Still, stories like that are the exception, rather than the rule, on Snapped.

Somehow, Snapped manages not to be tacky, even when the women who commit the crimes are. (The ladies from Las Vegas are the worst!) Sure, it’s an addictive true-crime series that sucks you in with sex, drugs, murder and all those easy hooks that can leave you feeling a little dirty afterwards. But, as Ms. Dudek pointed out, the show satisfies a real need for women besides pure entertainment: a fundamental curiosity that women have about each other and what they keep under the sink.

Hallelujah goes from 'Idol' to hit

If you watch television, the song has by now become unmistakable: A spare piano chord, a breathy voice and opening lines flecked with biblical references before an uplifting chorus kicks in. This is Hallelujah, a 23-year-old song that has become the most trafficked tune of the soundtrack era, setting the mood for dozens of TV shows and films. Last week, the no-longer cult classic achieved loftier status. Its most popular cover version, released by the late Jeff Buckley in 1994, zoomed to No. 1 on the iTunes download chart, thanks to that ultimate signifier of 21st Century ubiquity, a performance by an American Idol competitor. At the same time, Leonard Cohen, the song's enigmatic 73-year-old composer, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, serenaded with a version of the song by popular Irish balladeer Damien Rice.

"This is a watershed moment," said Michael Barthel, a Syracuse University graduate student who last year presented an academic paper on the song's staying power. "Every generation discovers 'Hallelujah,' and right now, a whole new generation of people is discovering it." So how does a rock-era song become a standard at a moment when radio play is hopelessly fragmented and pop songs are more beat-driven than lyrical? More often than not, muses the Boston Globe's Geoff Edgers, it's delivered in the background of a wordless montage featuring life, death, or heartache.



Among the TV shows that have given Hallelujah prominent play are House, The West Wing, Cold Case, The L Word, Nip/Tuck, Lost and Ugly Betty. With its sombre tone, Hallelujah has been used to dramatize real-life tragedy, including episodes of Without a Trace and Third Watch centred on Sept. 11. "It's so emotional and has a slow build and definitely can pack a punch," said Alyson Vidoli, music coordinator for GO Music Services, which finds music for House, Dexter and several other shows. "Somehow, it always seems to fit for the moment, and when you hear it, you say, 'We need more songs that are inspirational,'" added Tom Calderone, executive vice president of VH1.



Singer Brandi Carlile calls Hallelujah the best song ever written. "We have jazz standards and folk standards that have been passed down to generations," said Carlile. "We don't have that in rock 'n' roll right now. So it's kind of exciting to think of a song like Hallelujah being sung 200 years." It's an unlikely path for a song that was barely noticed upon its release. Cohen wrote Hallelujah, and recorded it in the early '80s for his Various Positions album. In the past, he has described it as "a song about the broken."

The album did not make a dent in the record charts. The song's long path to iTunes began in the early '90s when another cult hero, former Velvet Underground member John Cale, decided to re-record Hallelujah for a tribute album to Cohen. "I called and asked him to send the lyrics," Cale said. "I had one of those old fax machines. I went out to dinner and my floor was covered in paper. There were 15 verses of this song. I went through and just picked out the cheeky verses."



Cale's recording -- sung with a simple piano accompaniment -- would be embraced by Buckley, who was the son of '60s and '70s singer Tim Buckley. Cale's version has been used on the sitcom Scrubs and in Shrek, but it is Jeff Buckley's recording, released on his 1994 album, Grace, that has been featured most often in television shows. And it doesn't come cheap. Vidoli said that the rights to use a big song such as Hallelujah can cost as much as $40,000, which most cable networks can't afford.

Networks, however, haven't shied away from the Buckley rendition. The O.C. used it twice before featuring another version, by singer Imogen Heap, to mark the death of Marissa, a lead character, in the show's third season. In Ugly Betty, the Buckley version plays as a character collapses and dies of a heart attack.



Many, though, hadn't heard the song until last week's American Idol performance. The post-"Idol" surge pleased Mary Guibert, Buckley's mother. But she has grown concerned that the version recorded by her son, who drowned in 1997, may be reaching saturation. Guibert does not have the authority to deny permission for the song's use but is consulted by his record label when requests are made.

"It's not special if it's everywhere," said Guibert.

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.

Opening up about 'Treatment' mother

For the moment, Jaffa oranges and Uzis are no longer Israel's most famous export. That title belongs to a TV shrink and his roster of troubled patients says Matti Friedman...

Before In Treatment became a daily drama staple on HBO, it was Betipul, a low-budget, high-quality show widely regarded as one of the best programs ever created in Israel. The American version, which stars Gabriel Byrne as busy psychotherapist Paul Weston, has tweaked the script -- a fighter pilot is haunted by having killed civilians in Iraq, for example, instead of the West Bank -- and adds several original episodes. But HBO's In Treatment generally remains faithful to its parent in the Mideast.

The show, which concluded its eight-week second season earlier this month, premiered in 2005. It originated with Hagai Levi, who worked as an editor on the daily telenovellas that are trashy staples of daytime Israeli TV. At the time, American television's Tony Soprano-driven psychotherapy fad was already well under way. Levi, 45, had also studied psychology and been in treatment himself, providing the nucleus for the idea.

Aiming for the addictive potential of a soap but jettisoning the tepid dialogue and melodrama, Levi gambled that Israelis would be willing to watch an intellectual show consisting of little more than two people sitting in a room talking to each other -- and would be willing to do that every day. "Working on telenovellas, I saw the power of a daily series, one which becomes part of your routine and your life, and I wanted that," Levi said.

The format Levi came up with was original: For four days each week, the show's therapist, Reuven Dagan, would meet with a different patient, with the same one appearing every week on the same evening. On the fifth day, he would pour his heart out to his own shrink. The untried format was a risk for the cable company broadcasting the show. But it also was easy on the bottom line: With just two actors facing each other in a room, each episode cost a relatively cheap $25,000 to produce.

The show included some of the country's most beloved actors. Ayelet Zurer, who appeared in Steven Spielberg's Munich, played Naama, a seductive young woman whose interest in Dagan exceeds professional help. In the American version, the character, renamed Laura, is played by Melissa George. For Dagan, the producers chose an actor seen as embodying something of the quintessential Israeli: Assi Dayan, the talented and famously dissolute son of Moshe Dayan, the one-eyed general who was the quintessential Israeli of an older and more heroic generation.

What allowed Betipul to be translated with relative ease for a U.S. audience was its tendency to shy away from overtly Israeli themes, like conflict with Palestinians, in favour of personal problems that would be familiar to anyone living in a Western country. For Levi, the show's creator, Betipul was never a distinctively Israeli show, though it did have Jewish undertones. Levi grew up in a religious home and attended seminaries where studies centered on ancient Jewish legal texts like the Talmud. "There is certainly something Talmudic about the back-and-forth, question-and-answer format of the show," he said.

Selling the show to HBO marks a coming of age for Israel's TV industry, said Yaron Ten Brink, television critic for the Israeli mass circulation daily Yediot Ahronot. "People were sceptical -- they said if the idea was that good the Americans would have thought of it already," Ten Brink said. "This shows that a small industry without a lot money can develop strokes of brilliance with a low budget and do something that hasn't been seen before."

Levi used personal contacts in the U.S. television industry to get HBO's attention, and once the network's people had a look at his show they needed little convincing, said Rodrigo Garcia, executive producer of In Treatment. "The nature of the problems and conflicts it portrayed was elementary ... and universal, and we always thought it could very well translate to other cultures," Garcia stated.

Some alterations were made to make the characters more believable as Americans: "Voices and tone changed, of course, because aside from the nature of the conflicts, these were now American characters with different approaches to their problems and to interpersonal communication," according to Garcia. None of HBO's directors or actors viewed the Israeli series so they would have no preconceived notions of what the scenes should look like.

According to HBO, the show's episodes each average 2 million viewers. The success of Betipul may reflect Israelis' increasing acceptance of the idea of frequenting a psychiatrist's couch, which has developed as the country evolved from its early spartan and collective days to the more individualistic place it is today. "There is a lot more legitimacy to get help now than at any time in the past," said Dr. Roni Baht, the show's psychological consultant. "Today, there are places in Tel Aviv where if you're not in treatment people assume you lack depth."

Sooner rather than Later...

The combination of rock stars and live television can be combustible but the BBC is looking to take a big gamble by broadcasting its big music show live for the first time. Despite its party atmosphere, Later . . . with Jools Holland, a BBC Two fixture for 15 years, has always been recorded days before its Friday evening broadcast. When it emerged recently that the special New Year’s Eve Later. . . was actually recorded weeks in advance there was a flood of viewer complaints. A show that promises “live music” should be broadcast live, like its famous predecessors, they said.

BBC bosses have now decided that from next month, Later. . . will move to a 10pm slot on Tuesdays, and be broadcast live. The move is causing nervousness among stars and at the broadcaster. Adam Sherwin quotes an insider as saying: “Big American stars are nervous that something could go wrong on live television and it will be all over YouTube. But live TV gives a music show a real edge.” Previously, a technical fault or duff note could be corrected by another take. For the BBC, the danger is that any artist seeking cheap publicity or a soap box could hijack the airwaves in the slot before Newsnight.

Despite the surface bonhomie, artists see the show as a competitive fixture. Mark Cooper, the BBC’s head of musical entertainment, said: “Putting people in a room together makes them play better: someone observed that it is ‘communal but gladiatorial’.” Going live adds extra spice to the musical one-upmanship. The first live show will feature a rare performance by the Only Ones, a 1970s punk group famed for their sole hit, Another Girl Another Planet. Singer Peter Perrett once fled the US to avoid an arrest warrant on charges of attempted murder and assault with a deadly weapon, and also admits he has been a drug addict for nearly 30 years.

The producers are on safer ground with Adele, the teenage soul-jazz singer, who has also accepted the live challenge. Adele was invited on Later . . . last year, on the strength of a demo tape and has now become a chart-topping star. Gnarls Barkley and the singer-songwriter James Taylor also appear on the live debut on April 1, with Robert Plant and Alison Krauss and Portishead to follow.

The cameras will continue to roll during Newsnight on Tuesdays for an extended hour-long Later . . . which will then be shown on BBC Two on Friday nights as before.

There is, of course, a rich history to remind us of the perils of live music on television. It started with the ensuing outrage over Elvis Presley and his suggestive “gyrations” during his 1956 Hound Dog performance on the Milton Berle show. Then there was the "Filth and the Fury" of the Sex Pistols and a purple tirade by Steve Jones, egged on by Today show host Bill Grundy.



Power fails one minute into the 1989 Late Show performance by the Stone Roses. Singer Ian Brown shouts “amateurs” at the flailing host as she desperately tries to gloss over the embarrassment.

L7 grunge band guitarist Donita Sparks protests against patriarchal society by removing her knickers at the climax of an appearance on The Word.

Chris Evans promises Happy Mondays hell raiser Shaun Ryder a pair of shoes if he does not swear on TFI Friday- but it's a forlorn hope and Ryder is banned.

Required to sing over a backing track, Kurt Cobain unleashes a low moan during Nirvana's Top of the Pops debut with Smells Like Teen Spirit.

When All About Eve play on Top of the Pops viewers hear Martha’s Harbour but singer Julianne Regan is unaware the song is playing due to monitor failure.

Hancock and Joan

Paul Hoggart invites you to meet the lover- and best friend's wife- of Tony Hancock as their affair is made into a BBC TV drama...

A comic genius cuckolds his best friend, a gentle actor beloved by the nation. The actor's young wife discovers undreamt-of passion in the comic's arms, then watches helplessly as alcoholism and thwarted ambition destroy him. She finally learns of his suicide in circumstances so tragic that they could have been devised by Thomas Hardy.

This is not some tragic romantic fiction, but the painfully real story of Tony Hancock and his affair with Joan, the wife of his best friend John Le Mesurier. It is retold, without a whiff of sentimentality or melodrama, in Hancock and Joan, a poignant new play by Rick Cottan. Ken Stott plays Hancock, Maxine Peake is Joan and Alex Jennings the long-suffering John.

Following Fantabulosa!, its superb but excruciating 2006 Kenneth Williams drama starring Michael Sheen, BBC Four has made a season of dramas about the tortured lives of 1960s comedy icons. Jason Isaacs and Phil Davis kick off as Steptoe and Son (Wilfred Brambell and Harry H.Corbett); David Walliams is Frankie Howerd; and Trevor Eve plays Hughie Green. Not all clowns shed bitter private tears - think of those cheery surviving Pythons - but this menu promises a banquet of anguish: desperate gay predation, adultery, betrayal and mutual hatred, and lashings of self-loathing all round.

Cottan based his script on Lady Don't Fall Backwards, Joan's account of the affair published in 1988 (John had died in 1983). He interviewed her in her handsome Ramsgate home, full of mementoes of both the men she loved. When we talk, Joan is extraordinarily spry, jolly, open and disarmingly frank about her relationships. At 76, she still has the kind of raunchy laugh that would have done justice to Sid James in a Carry On film. "The attraction was very strong and instantaneous," she tells me, recalling the day that her husband first brought Hancock to their home. “I'd been married before, but this was the first time I'd been head over heels in love.” I mention that her book implies that Hancock had strong sexual charisma. “Definitely!” she says with that earthy laugh. “Very strong! But he was also very vulnerable. He brought out my maternal feelings, and he was always so funny, even in the depths of depression.”

Joan had been working at the Establishment, Peter Cook's satire club, when she met John. His wife Hattie Jacques was leaving him for a younger man, and Hattie herself set John and Joan up on a date. “He was still desperately unhappy about Hattie,” she recalls. “He was completely helpless. He couldn't even boil an egg. Once when I was ill he tried to make me a cup of tea and he put the tea straight into the kettle. He had exquisitely good manners but he was like a lot of public schoolboys then, completely undomesticated. Even when I'd gone to live with Tony, I used to pop home to pay the bills and organise the cleaner.”

Hancock was depressed about the collapse of his marriage to his second wife, Freddie, when John brought him home. “With Tony it was the first time I'd been completely swept off my feet,” she says “Physically, it hadn't really happened between me and John. He was the first to admit that right to the end.” In the first flush of the affair, she and Hancock wanted to have a baby together, she tells me. “We weren't lucky, but we had a lot of fun trying!” That laugh again. She quickly learnt two things about her new lover. The first was that he was desperate to be recognised as a comic genius on his own. “He wanted to be like his idols. He loved Buster Keaton, Jacques Tati and especially Sid Fields,” she says. “He did a marvellous imitation of Sid Fields. He made me laugh and laugh and laugh.” He had gradually ousted characters from his radio and television show. “Kenneth Williams was particularly bitter about that,” she says. “Vitriolic!”

By the time they met he had jettisoned Sid James, desperate not to become a double act. “I once told him he was very funny with Sid. ‘Did you like The Blood Donor?' he asked me. ‘Yes,' I said. ‘Well Sid wasn't in it!'” Finally, he abruptly dumped his writers, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, claiming that they got all their material from him anyway, listening to him holding forth in the bar. “It was disastrous,” she says. “I wanted him to give up the business and become a farmer or a plumber, anything, but he couldn't and wouldn't.”

“It's so common,” Cottan, the writer, reflects. “A great performer spends half his life trying to get rid of the character who has made him famous, without realising that that character is him, and that's what the public love him for.”

Joan's second lesson was infinitely harder. “Tony sounded much more upper-class than his comedy character,” she says. “He was a strange mixture, very economical sometimes and flamboyantly extravagant, always staying in the Maharaja Suite at the Mayfair Hotel. And he loved fine wines.” But she soon discovered that wine was the most innocent of his tipples. “At first I was very naive about his alcoholism, but I soon learnt to read the signs. When he was supposed to be drying out he was very cunning and deceitful, as alcoholics often are. He'd suddenly say he was going to the shops, which he never did. Once he said he was going to join the library at seven at night!”

Although Hancock had been occasionally violent with his previous wives, Joan tells me he never hit her, lashing out with his tongue instead. “You had to keep him off the brandy if at all possible. It made him really nasty.” Hancock himself called it “the old infuriator”. Joan says Hancock's mother, Lily, warned her not to take him to France, and, if they did go, to make sure he stayed off the cognac. The drama opens in the aftermath of an incident when Hancock drank a whole bottle in five minutes at his mother's home and collapsed. “When he came round from the coma the doctor asked: ‘Do you want to die, Mr Hancock?', and he said ‘Yes',” Joan recalls. “I was really hurt by that.” Her father had been “a big Hancock buff”, she says, but in a drunken outburst he called her mother “a parochial Mancunian cunt!”. After that they would have nothing to do with him.

Cottan has deliberately omitted some of his strangest antics in case the play became too dark. Joan recalls one New Year's Eve when, under the influence of prescription drugs, Hancock wandered into the ballroom under his Pimlico flat dressed only in a candlewick bedspread and wearing a G-string, back to front. “He walked up to a woman, who screamed, and said: ‘I bet you've never seen one of these!'” Unable to cope, Joan went back to the ever-forgiving John, but the affair resumed in secret shortly before Hancock left for Australia and his bid for international stardom. “I told Tony that if he stayed dry for a year I would leave John and marry him.”

This is where Thomas Hardy seems to hijack the plot. Hancock's show was not going well. He became depressed and hit the bottle. He wrote to her every day. She got his letters but a postal strike in Australia meant that he never received her replies. She could never get through on the phone and, because the resumed affair was still secret, she couldn't leave messages. He couldn't ring her house in case John answered. When she was cited as corespondent in Hancock's divorce case, Joan told the press the affair was over. He saw the reports in the British papers and believed them. The night before he died he rang Lily in desperation. Lily rang Joan's parents, who told her that Joan was in Rome with John and wanted nothing to do with him. Lily relayed this to Hancock, who believed he had lost her. The night that Joan returned from Rome was when Hancock was taking the pills.

“It took me a year to get over the grief,” she says, but she stayed with the kindly and ever-forgiving John until his death in 1983. She insists that it remained a happy marriage in its way. “He was always my confidant,” she says, even during the affair with Tony. They both had occasional flings with other partners, she says, but nothing that would endanger the marriage. “What, John too?” I ask. He was away filming a lot, she says, and people would offer themselves “but he was very well mannered, and I think he was too polite to say no.” She suffered some criticism when she wrote her memoir five years later, “but I think it's a jolly good story,” she says. Now she lives in her handsome Ramsgate home surrounded by mementoes of the two men she loved.

And watching the drama? “It was uncanny,” she says, “very emotional. At first I was a little nervous, but Maxine Peake was excellent. Ken Stott was so Hancockian! The walk, the body, the movements: all perfect. It was like a stab to the heart.”

Hancock and Joan is on BBC Four on March 26. The Curse of Comedy season begins on BBC Four on Wednesday at 9pm with The Curse of Steptoe

Five years in

This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything immeasurably small or great in your life must return to you-all in the same succession and sequence-even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over and over, and you with it, a grain of dust...

Like Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence and Freud’s return of the repressed, the war in Iraq keeps on coming back to bite us in the pineal gland. We do our best to distract ourselves with the collapse of the American economy or the rehab of pop tarts, muses John Leonard, but then another suicide bomb explodes in Baghdad and we are made to wonder once again—$3 trillion for exactly what?

Bush’s War can’t tell us exactly “what,” except for a fiasco, but this two-night, four and a half hour Frontline special could be the best audiovisual history of who, why, when, and how available to date. Since Frontline has been tracking the metastasis from 9/11 through to the surge, producer Michael Kirk had access to more than 40 previous stories to bolster a fresh batch of interviews. Not only do most of the principals speak for themselves, but because they often had to revise, improve, or repudiate earlier sound bites, they speak against themselves, too.

The effect can be oddly loopy, observes Leonard, as if Jon Stewart’s Daily Show had hunkered down with YouTube to splice together a meta blooper reel. Except that nobody’s laughing, especially not the journalists who have been invited to perform as a kind of Greek chorus between the arias of, say, a Richard Armitage and a Pierre-Richard Prosper. It is of course impossible to say how much Jane Mayer of The New Yorker; Elizabeth Bumiller and James Risen of the New York Times; and Karen DeYoung, Dana Priest, and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post have been edited, but their remarks here manage mostly to make the obvious less obscure. One wonders where these sardonic scribblers were during the run-up to the war.

Probably because we are too familiar with the recent quagmire phase of the conflict—Sunnis and Shiites, Halliburton and insurgency, Bremer and Abu Ghraib—Bush’s War is most compelling in its first instalment. From the moment of attack on the Twin Towers, Iraq was what the administration wanted its War on Terror to be about. As early as the afternoon of September 11, the president’s advisers cooked up a rhetorical formulation—equating “those who harbour” terrorists with the terrorists themselves—that would authorize targeting the neo-con Beelzebub, Saddam Hussein. About Bush, David Frum admits, “I don’t know if he understood fully and foresaw fully the true radicalism of what he had just said.” But those around him did. And if Saddam is the magnetic pole toward which your compass needle invariably points, you will see aluminium tubes, Nigerian yellow-cake, and germ warfare wherever you look. We could be watching Vantage Point, that Rashomon with training wheels, except that all the president’s men saw the same something that wasn’t there.

Underline the word men. Over and over in Bush’s War, we’re told that Rummy, Cheney, John Bolton, George Tenet, and John Yoo are “men’s men” and “alpha males.” Red-faced and beefy, they say so themselves. The vice-president and the Secretary of Defence do their best to undermine the CIA, nobody talks to Condoleezza Rice, everybody lies to Colin Powell, and the State Department’s counter-terrorism coordinator Cofer Black dreams of “heads on pikes … flies crawling across their dead eyes.” Nor are alpha males squeamish. From the Afghanistan wet dream of warlords on horseback to the Guantánamo nightmare of dog cages and waterboarding, they’ll do what it takes. If torture is a problem, get a memo from Gonzales. The president will sign anything.

Bush’s War is on PBS Monday, March 24, and Tuesday, March 25, at 9 p.m.

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'

Eddie Izzard's master plan

Eddie Izzard has a master plan writes Caryn James in her feature on the eccentric comedian and actor...

Eddie Izzard's metaphors don’t sit still, onstage or off; they leap into the conversation with an almost physical presence, even when he’s simply describing how tough it is for a comic to be accepted as a dramatic actor. “If you arrive in comedy,” he said, “the studios won’t let you get off that horse. You have to shoot it, you have to kill it, you have to Bill Murray kill it, boom!" and he mimes shooting a horse as he explains, “Bill Murray successfully did that so he could get to the dramatic place he wanted to be; he really had to kill that Ghostbusters place.”

The man who chats off-stage is a less frenetic version of the performer whose fans recite lines from his stand-up shows, like Dress to Kill, the HBO special that made him a cult figure 10 years ago. In person, he also does voices and accents, talks about Napoleon and George Washington, drops in bits of songs. (“It’s going to be about cats!” he said, jumping into a spoof Broadway musical and cheerfully singing, “He’s dead, he’s in a box,” all as a quick aside.) He pulls out a phone and shows photos of a recent vacation with his father and brother to Yemen, where he was born before the family returned to Britain when he was 1.

But just as the inspired silliness of Bill Murray shooting the Ghostbusters horse almost obscures a deeper point — Mr. Izzard has analyzed that career for all it’s worth — the surreal wit veils a methodical determination to be taken seriously in drama. The guy who may be the most brilliant stand-up of his generation really wants to act. His ambitions are huge, but when he talks about his step-by-step career path he makes himself sound like some plodding worker ant. That would be complicated enough without adding — and he’s the one who brings it up first — that he’s a transvestite, or an “off-duty transvestite” as he tends to put it now, since he’s been appearing on-stage in jeans and a blue sport jacket in a workshop version of Stripped, the show he’ll take on a four-month national tour starting next month.

That was hardly his look in Dress to Kill or other stand-up shows. Then he appeared in heavy eye shadow, glittery shirts and sometimes skirts and fishnet stockings as he roamed the stage delivering riffs about culture, history and language — routines that are literally loopy as they swoop and circle back on themselves. In his recent New York show he quacked like an evil duck left behind after Noah loaded the ark (because, really, would the ducks have drowned?) and acted out a scene in which Jesus returns to heaven and tells his Father how he messed up on Earth. (How did he die? “Donkey cart accident.”) As he interspersed these pieces with bits about Wikipedia or updating computers, out of nowhere the evil duck quacked again.

But he did all this looking like his character in The Riches, the television series in which he plays Wayne Malloy, the father of a family of “travellers” or con artists who have taken on false identities and settled into a McMansion. Wayne masquerades as a lawyer named Doug Rich, which means that these days Eddie Izzard could pass for a corporate lawyer. (He is also an executive producer of the series, whose second season begins Tuesday on the FX network.) The Riches and his non-femme appearance are part of his bid for the leading roles that have eluded him on-screen. He was most widely seen as the computer genius Roman Nagel in Ocean’s Twelve and Ocean’s Thirteen and has another small role in Valkyrie, the Tom Cruise World War II movie coming this summer, but more often he has landed in parts that make you wonder what he was thinking, like the mad scientist in the flop My Super Ex-Girlfriend.

He has had more substantial roles in plays, including David Mamet's Cryptogram in London and A Day in the Death of Joe Egg in the West End and on Broadway (where he was nominated for a Tony). During the time of that run he lived in the West Village, and we met at Tavern on Jane, a casual restaurant a block from his old street of brick town houses. “It’s really beautiful,” he said of the neighborhood, and he recalled “going to that corner shop to get as much wood as I could to heat up — the snows of 2003.” As he does on-stage, he sometimes breaks off sentences and zooms ahead, as if his mind were racing too fast to bother finishing; the rest is clear, anyway.

His humour reflects the scattershot lunacy of Monty Python, but with flashes of Robin Williams's manic energy and a sophisticated silliness that is entirely his own. Walk into a room, say “Cake? Or death,” and some people will fall on the floor laughing at the phrase from one of the most uproarious and sharpest parts of Dress to Kill. He imagined what it would have been like if the Church of England, instead of the Romans, had tried to conquer the world. It might have resembled a polite invitation to tea with the vicar, he said in the act. “Cake? Or death?”

Describing Mr. Izzard’s humour, Mr. Williams said by e-mail: “It sounds like a contradiction, but his comedy is gentle cutting edge. Kind of like a velvet razor.” Part of this edge comes from walking onstage not knowing exactly where he’ll begin, in performances that have a sense of direction rather than a script. I saw two workshop shows a few nights apart at the Union Square Theater, and the second began with a completely fresh, high-energy rush of material, a dazzling little prologue: he danced out as though he were on Broadway, raced through a snippet about “Hamlet” (“Dad is dead?”), did Christopher Walken as George Bush, and said he is clueless about Broadway shows because “I’m a straight transvestite; I know nothing about musicals. He doesn’t always mention being a transvestite in his shows, he said. But he did in the two I saw, and it worked as a disarming strategy: acknowledge it for fans who are wondering what happened, then move on. “I am a transvestite; I’m just off-duty at the moment,” he told the audience, and immediately went on, “I never was a transvestite; it was a tax thing.”

As he explained later: “Some people would heckle me and say ‘Where’s the dress?’ and I’d say ‘Don’t oppress me, you Nazi’ — tends to shut them up. Because I have fought for the right to be able to wear a dress, not that I have to wear a dress. I didn’t jump out of a not-wearing-dress box into a have-to-wear-dress box.” But isn’t he now in a have-to-wear-pants box for career purposes? “Slightly,” he acknowledged. “Socially, politically, the number of out transvestites in the public eye are few.” And in American-accented voices he imagined one studio executive trying to persuade another to hire him: “ ‘Yeah, he’s a transvestite — but he hasn’t been wearing a dress for a while.’ ”
“ ‘Yeah, I suppose that’s O.K.’ ”

Being a transvestite is “still not part of the establishment,” he said. “ ‘Twelve transvestite senators turned up today’ — it hasn’t been said yet. You’re always sort of outside the loop. When he started performing in England, he wore ordinary men’s clothes but worried that the press would learn of his transvestism and run with the news in a lurid way. He told reporters that he was a transvestite; they thought it was a joke. “So I thought, I’ll wear a dress and wear makeup,” he said, “and they wrote, ‘O.K., he is a transvestite, but he looks a mess.’ ”

“By the time I got to America in ’96, I thought, I’m going to bring it to America so I don’t have to do a two-step here,” he said. Eventually people saw him only as the cross-dressing stand-up, though, so he veered again, and here he is as Doug Rich. Sort of. In the poster art for Stripped he is wearing an open lacy shirt, suit and jewelled collar pin, an image he described as rock ’n’ roll. He may be wearing a bit of eye make-up — more than most men but less than Keith Richards. It’s a dandyish, Beau Brummel look that hints at the balance he has to find at this stage of his career.

Like so many performers, he can trace the first impulse of that career to childhood. His father worked for British Petroleum, and after the family moved back to Britain, his mother died of cancer when Eddie was 6. “The acting career is the most important, because that’s what I wanted to do in the first place,” he said. “When I was 7, I wanted to act. I saw a kid up onstage, and I think it was a substitute for Mum dying. The audience was showing affection or admiration for something they saw onstage, and I just thought, I need that.”

He has plenty of adulation now. John Cleese famously called him “the lost Python,” and there is wide opinion that in his generation — he’s 46 — his only competition for sheer comic genius is Chris Rock. But no one is saying, “Wonder who’s better, Izzard or Sean Penn?” Why is he so bent on doing drama? “Because the world stopped me getting anywhere. I was ready at, really, 7. I was ready at 10.” Even now, he said, his attitude is a relentless “I will not stop until I get the thing.”

It’s not as if he was a natural at stand-up. He was more facile at sketch comedy but couldn’t get a job; he tried street performing and was bad at it. And at first, he said: “I could not do stand-up to save my life. Apparently now I’m quite good at it, but I know how I’ve got that good: it’s just by — I will do gig after gig after gig after gig.” He can be an extremely effective actor. His strongest screen role so far has been as Charlie Chaplin in Peter Bogdanovich's underrated 2001 film, The Cat’s Meow, about a 1920s murder on William Randolph Hearst's yacht. His Chaplin is a driven, complex character, self-absorbed yet madly in love with Hearst’s mistress.

Mr. Bogdanovich said he had never heard of Eddie Izzard when his name was mentioned for the role but went to see his stand-up act, then asked him to lunch: “I remember he came in wearing a padded bra, and I thought, ‘O.K., I’m not going to say anything about this.’ ” Mr. Bogdanovich now gives Mr. Izzard huge credit for helping to shape the character by improvising and working on dialogue. “Hollywood and movie producers tend to think in clichés,” Mr. Bogdanovich added, considering why Mr. Izzard’s film career hasn’t taken off. “They just see him as a stand-up who occasionally acts, and they don’t realize the depth of his talent. He can do just about anything. Eddie is very, very gifted, not just as an actor but as a writer and a shaper of material.” The Riches gets him partway to the dramatic place where he wants to be. The Malloys — Wayne, his wife, Dahlia (played by Minnie Driver) and their three children — are acting every minute of their lives, pretending to be the Riches. But the show is deliberately not Wayne-playing-Doug-channeling-Eddie. The series has its dark moments even as it puts a clever, mordant spin on the idea of upward mobility and reinvention in America.

Fun and smart though it is, though, it’s not in ground-breaking Sopranos territory, and Wayne Malloy is not quite a star-making role. Last season’s ratings were good, not spectacular. And as the screenwriters’ strike was ending, FX decided not to go back into production to complete the season, truncating it to the seven episodes already shot. John Landgraf, the president of FX, said it had been a practical and economic decision, because the last episodes would have competed with a flood of returning network series. If the audience grows a bit, he said, the show could return for a third season.

To Mr. Izzard, The Riches is a major step toward other leading roles and a way to leverage himself into even more stand-up. An American series seen in foreign countries, he said, opens the door to doing stand-up there. He has performed in French and says he plans to learn German and Russian well enough to do gigs in those languages too. If he is a worker ant, he’s an ant quietly plotting world domination. And while few people would bet on The Riches returning, he insisted he’s not worried about Season 2, but Season 7. He would not budge from that position; he is relentless. The difficulty of bringing back The Riches was, of all things, the question he would not hear.

The second season of The Riches begins Tuesday on the FX network

Further reading: From drag to Riches