What do we have in common? Short attention spans...
JOOLS HOLLAND AND JIM MOIR, (VIC REEVES), TELL MARION McMULLEN ABOUT THEIR FUN NEW PODCAST
You’ve been friends for more than 35 years and are now doing new podcast Joyride. What traits do you have in common?
Jim: We’re both very excitable and intrigued by things and ....
Jools: (Laughs) We’ve both got quite short attention spans.
Jim: We’re very inquisitive and I think doing the podcast helps... We do things that we like doing. I think the only way things can work well is if you enjoy doing them. Jools: Exactly. You’ve got to love what you do and love the people you’re doing it with.
Jim: When we first started doing it I don’t think we had much of any plan to be honest. You follow the trail and see where you go with it.
Guests include Bob Mortimer, Jane Horrocks and Chris Difford. How would describe the podcast?
Jools: It’s like having a chat with friends. These are people we know and love, but might see once a year in the pub or at a party and it’s great having time with and having a chat. I hope the listener feels they are at the table with us.
Jim: (Smiling) It’s eavesdropping. It’s travel and transport, but it’s really just a route to yarns and what we can prise out of guests.
Jools: In a formal chat show you get someone flogging something. Here you get people telling stories and get a sense of who they are, which is great.
Jim: I think some people were thinking it’s all about cars, but it’s not in the slightest. It’s quite the opposite to be honest. Food and travel, that’s what everyone does isn’t it, so everyone has got a story. Jools: Once people know it’s me and Jim, I think guests realise that the podcast is going to be fun and easy and relaxed.
Has it been hard staying at home because of the pandemic?
Jim: I can travel around my land, I can go a short distance in a car and go for a walk. I miss getting on a train and going places, but we’ll be back to normal before you know it. Jools has his model railway so he can travel quite some incredible distance.
Jools: Yes, I can go from my model of St Pancras onto my model Eurostar all the way across Europe to Berlin in the space of about 60ft, but I did find it bit upsetting when I realised I couldn’t do it in reality. I was re-enacting something no longer actually possible to do.
Most of my travelling, which I enjoy doing, is 98% through my work because we are travelling to shows around the British Isles and Europe. That’s my world, but we can’t do that now.
When I’m on tour I make a point of seeing sights and maybe taking an extra few days somewhere if it’s somewhere nice, so I do miss that.
What do you miss most?
Jim: The thing I probably miss most is going to a restaurant. I’m not much of a pub-goer, but I do like a restaurant so that’s me.
A year ago Bob (Mortimer) and I went on a mini tour about eight dates, eight places, just telling stories of our lives in showbusiness.
It was kind of organised because I said I’d like to go to Buxton and just have a nose around there.
We’ve done this before. I’ll be sitting in a van with Bob and will say ‘Can we go to Melton Mowbray to try the pork pies?’
That’s what I want to do. Just go somewhere and nose around. Jools: I like being on tour and sightseeing, but not everyone likes looking at stuff. There’s a great singer, Louise Marshall who sings with us, but hates travel. We’ve taken her to a lovely castle or gardens to look at or a sacred site, or a few stones from the Neolithic period in a foggy field somewhere and you never get her out the car.
We went to one of those fantastic abbeys up in Yorkshire noted to be one of the most beautiful sites in Britain. It was ravishingly beautiful and she just went ‘Urgh’ and threw a blanket over her head.
What is on your travel wish list?
Jim: I’ve been thinking about this, especially this past year. You put things on a back burner and can end up in your grave and not done anything.
I’ve always wanted to go to Yosemite National Park and I think I’ve just got to go and do it.
Jools: Yosemite is where I believe they have the gigantic redwood trees and they have an arch carved out of them.
There are photographs from 1960s of a bloke with all his family all waving out of them. I was so impressed by this that, when we built the studio where we now do the podcast, I put one of those trees there by the entrance so eventually it will grow into this great thing and you’ll be able to drive through it.
But apparently you’ll have to wait 500 years.
Jim: I went to Sequoia National Park which has the General Grant Tree which is the biggest tree in the world and it’s a sight to see. The top of it is in the clouds. It’s like 5,000 years old or something.
I’ve got a lot of places I really want to go and see before it gets too late.
CORY Band welcomes Royal Marines support for the Kapitol Cory Online Championships.
Plans for the contest have been given a boost by confirmation of major support from Her Majesty’s Royal Marines.
Public Engagement Officer WO 1 Nev Dednum RM said: “We are delighted to be strengthening our great relationship with the world famous Cory Band, and partnering with them as a major sponsor of the 2021 Cory Online Brass Band Championships.
“This is a brilliant and innovative project and we wish all the competing bands the very best of luck.
“We look forward to seeing the results of their endeavours in March”
Commenting on the high-profile partnership, Cory Band’s musical director, Philip Harper, said: “We are so pleased to be able to continue to attract the highest quality support for our online competition and it does’t come much higher than the Royal Marines.
“We are very much looking forward to working together.
“It gives a further incentive to all the bands who are currently working hard making their video entries.
“I am sure everyone will benefit from this link-up with such a professional and highlyregarded organisation.”
LYNDA LA PLANTE is contemplating how she’d like to bring her dogged detective DCI Jane Tennison, originally played 30 years ago by Helen Mirren, back to life.
“I’ve been asked this so many times. I thought, ‘What is she doing now?’ She’s past retirement age. I’ve started a novel, but she’s retired.”
Lynda reveals Tennison may be brought out of retirement to investigate a cold case.
“I’m working on it. It’s on the back burner. I’d love it for the screen. I’d love to meet Helen and say, ‘Come back now! One more time, Helen!’
“But she’s so hugely successful and such a big movie star now that I don’t know if she would be interested. It would be wonderful, though.”
Lynda may be 77, but the former actress from Liverpool – creator of Prime Suspect and Widows, author of the novelisations which followed, plus a string of young Tennison books and standalone thrillers – shows no sign of slowing down.
The bestselling author and scriptwriter has only been out of her home in Surrey to walk the dog and do a bit of grocery shopping for most of the past year, and recently had her first Covid vaccination jab, but the solitude hasn’t stemmed her creative juices, hard-working ethos and wicked sense of humour.
She’s been positively productive during the pandemic, written two books – Judas Horse, the second in a new series featuring hapless detective Jack Warr, and a new young Tennison novel, Unholy Murder, out in the summer – and has just launched the second series of her forensics podcast, Listening To The Dead.
“I’m so used to being solitary in writing that it’s galvanised me. I’m like a lunatic. I can’t stop!” she enthuses. She’s also hoping to make a number of appearances to celebrate Prime Suspect’s 30th anniversary, pandemic allowing.
The series broke barriers on its release, as Tennison battled sexism and prejudice in a male-dominated profession, refusing to be undermined by colleagues who questioned her seniority and ability. It ran for seven series, from 1991-2006, although Lynda bowed out after series three to pursue other projects.
She recently found the original Prime Suspect script she had written, inspired by the experiences of ex-Flying Squad officer Jackie Malton. It cast Helen Mirren as DCI Tennison, the first woman in the history of the Met to lead a murder investigation after years of being overlooked, and aired in April 1991. The novelisation followed that year and is still in print.
“I had a terrible time with her name because you are not allowed to call a TV detective by the name of somebody already in the force.
“I could never have called her the name of the policewomen I know.
“You have to find a name that is not in the ranks of the Metropolitan Police,” Lynda recalls.
“She started off as Brownlow, but there was already a Brownlow. But I always loved the poet (Alfred, Lord) Tennyson’s work – and thought, ‘Nobody’s going to be called Tennison in the Met’, and they weren’t.”
Lynda never anticipated the huge success of the series, which won a clutch of Baftas and Emmys for cast and creators. She always had Helen in mind for the part, she recalls.
“It was quite a fight. The [TV executives] were very much bringing up names [of actors] who were completely wrong for her. I kept saying no. Then I was met with, ‘Well, I don’t know Helen’s work – has she done a lot of TV?’ I said, ‘No, she’s a great theatre and film actress, she’s the right age to be a DCI.’
“Thirty years ago there were only three high powered female detective chief inspectors in the Met.”
After Lynda parted company with the TV detective she was not impressed at the way the character turned into an alcoholic battling her demons. Today, she says: “My hope for the character was that she would become commander, which is the reason why I walked.
“I didn’t want her to be an alcoholic. I didn’t want her to lose her way. She’d come so far and lost so much of her love life, I didn’t want her to become an alcoholic and prove she couldn’t cope. Every woman I’d met who had reached the top coped magnificently.”
It’s no secret that over the years Lynda has conducted painstaking research into her subjects. She’s graced the tiled floors of mortuaries, witnessed numerous post mortems and is an honorary fellow of the Forensic Science Society.
She has amazing contacts she can call on for all sorts of minute details pertaining to crime and the changes in investigative practices.
“The mobile phone can lead you to a killer, CCTV is everywhere these days – and then there are computers. And I’m so cack-handed with them! My son [adopted son, Lorcan, 17] fortunately, is an IT expert.”
In 2015, Lynda brought back the detective in the first of a series of prequel novels as young Tennison, rewinding to the Seventies as the 22-year-old newbie WPC is drawn into her first murder case.
Despite falling out with ITV executives over creative differences concerning 2017 TV adaptation, Prime Suspect 1973, which was axed after one series, Lynda has continued to pen her young Tennison novels, with Blunt Force, the sixth in the series, coming out in paperback.
“I’m taking the young Tennison through the Seventies when she’s just out of training school, up through the Eighties and Nineties to the point where she becomes DCI Jane Tennison.
“I’m able to construct her life, her disappointments, failures and dogged persistence. It’s been very informative to go back to talk to women who were officers then. Which means Prime Suspect is constantly in my brain.”
In the 30 years since she penned Prime Suspect, many things have changed. The Met, for instance, now has its first female chief, Dame Cressida Dick, who she has met.
Yet sexism hasn’t been totally eradicated, Lynda observes.
“Sexism, as well as competitiveness [exist], but women have broken through, you can’t keep them down. It’s just that they are learning how to deal with it. Plus, in a team of officers, you daren’t have any form of discrimination or sexual harassment on show, but it is there, it’s just underneath.”
What would DCI Tennison make of the world today? “I think she’d take it in her stride,” Lynda reflects.
And then we’re back to the possibility of Helen returning to the role that made her a household name.
“I keep in touch with Helen Mirren, mostly on a congratulatory basis. She might be tempted to come back, you never know. And if it’s a good enough and strong enough storyline, maybe she would be interested.”
I keep in touch with Helen Mirren. She might be tempted to come back, you never know
Lynda on reviving DCI Tennison
Blunt Force is published by Zaffre in paperback on March 4, £8.99. Judas Horse is published by Zaffre on April 1, £14.99. Prime Suspect is published by Simon & Schuster, £7.99 paperback.