Courage of the Israeli singer at heart of Eurovision’s Gaza storm
How Richard Gadd went from his happy middle-class childhood to become
IT is a statement of the utmost courage and defiance from a young singer with the eyes of the world on her. After braving protests ahead of tonight’s Eurovision Song Contest – and booing during rehearsals – Israeli contestant Eden Golan says: ‘I’m not scared. In fact, I’ve been very happy.’
In an exclusive interview with the Mail, the 20-year- old contestant said: ‘[The semi-final] gave me a huge boost of energy and I’m totally focused.’
Sweden’s terror threat is at four on a fivepoint scale as it prepares to host the final against a backdrop of demonstrations against Israel’s participation.
Golan has become a lightning rod for protest following the invasion of Gaza in response to the Hamas atrocities of October 7, when more than 1,100 Israelis died and 252 were taken hostage.
Since then, Israeli attacks on the coastal territory have resulted in more than 34,000 deaths, according to the Hamas-controlled health ministry.
An estimated 12,000 people turned out to protest against Golan’s presence in Malmo, where the show is taking place, on Thursclose day and another demonstration was planned for today.
Meanwhile, venues across Britain are cancelling viewing parties after pro-Palestine protest groups instructed their followers to hound pubs showing the contest’s final. Some have even been forced to their doors as they fear for their staff’s safety.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak yesterday described the protests as ‘outrageous’ and calls for a boycott ‘wrong’.
The controversy over Israel’s entry has even dragged in some of Golan’s fellow competitors. The Netherlands’ Eurovision entry Joost Klein is under investigation by organisers the European Broadcasting Union after an incident at a press conference on Thursday evening.
Amid rumours that terrorists are planning to bomb the Malmo Arena where the final will be staged, Golan was asked by a Polish radio station whether she thought she was causing a security risk for other participants by attending the event.
When the moderator of the conference told Golan she did not have to answer the question if she did not want to, Klein shouted out: ‘Why not?’
He missed the show’s penultimate dress rehearsal yesterday, where he had been due to perform in fifth place ahead of Golan, and it is not clear if he will perform in tonight’s final.
In another incident, last year’s Finnish entrant Kaarija apologised for dancing with Golan after a video of them together attracted thousands of negative comments on social media.
‘ I would like to clarify and emphasise that the video is not a political statement or an endorsement of any kind,’ he wrote in a statement on Instagram.
Greek Eurovision entry Marina Satti also attracted criticism for pretending to be asleep as Golan spoke at a press conference.
And the UK’s representative, Olly Alexander, was among nine Eurovision artists who have signed a letter calling for a Gaza ceasefire.
Meanwhile, Denmark, Finland, Norway and even host country Sweden have repeatedly called for Israel to be banned from the contest altogether. And in Belgium, two ministers demanded that the Jewish state be treated the same as Russia, which has been barred since 2022 following its invasion of Ukraine.
Golan herself has endured a barrage of death threats and Israel’s national security agency, Shin Bet, has ordered her to leave her hotel room only to perform.
One can understand why. The streets of Malmo are dotted with vile posters of Golan that depict her with devil horns and encircled by haunting images of dead Palestinian babies, under the words: ‘Boycott Eurovision’ and ‘Israhell!’
Last week in my interview with Golan, published in the Mail on Sunday, she said she wouldn’t ‘let anything break me’, adding: ‘I wouldn’t say I’m worried. I’m prepared.’ There were some boos from the audience during her performance in the semi-final but she was unfazed.
‘Of course it was not pleasant,’ she says. ‘But I didn’t let it get to me. I wanted it to be my best performance.’
Her family – father Eddie, 56, mother Olga, 50, and brother Sean, 17 – have stayed at home in Tel Aviv as their presence would have created another headache for the already overstretched police force.
‘They’re worried,’ she admits. ‘But they’re confident in my security and very proud of me.’
The city was relatively calm yesterday. But Golan’s security team was taking no chances. She was driven to the Malmo Arena in a convoy of a dozen cars escorted by police outriders.
The venue is surrounded by metal barricades and large concrete blocks, with armed police guarding the venue and visitors required to pass through metal detectors.
Given the disruption, it’s no surprise to find that Malmo’s res
‘I won’t let anything break me, I’m prepared’
‘This year’s contest is too political’
idents have mixed views about Israel’s participation.
Ana, 44, who declines to give her last name, believes Israel should have been barred from the competition.
‘I think what Israel is doing [in Gaza] is genocide. It was wrong of them to participate this year. I know the competition is about unity but Russia was excluded in 2022, so the same thing should have happened to Israel.’
Lifelong Eurovision fan David Lever, 58, from Brighton, arrived in Malmo on Monday. He and a friend, wearing matching silver sequined jackets, have tickets for the final.
To him, the song contest is all about ‘ diversity and an insight into European music’.
He sympathises with Golan. ‘She’s only 20,’ he tells me. ‘She’s at the beginning of her career. [Hurricane] is a good song and it should be rewarded on the merits of that.’
It’s a sentiment shared by friends Mike Kleinschmidt and Leif Hanson, from Hamburg in Germany.
‘Usually the atmosphere at the final is vivid and one of celebration. But this year it’s too political. People have the right to demonstrate and make their opinions heard, as long as they do so safely,’ says Mike.
Many reckon that the controversy surrounding Golan means she has little chance of winning but, while Baby Lasagna, from Croatia, remains the favourite, Israel has jumped to second place, gaining 17 percentage points in the past 24 hours.
‘I’m so excited about the final,’ Golan says. ‘ This has been my mission, and something I’ve been practising for my whole life – and I can’t wait.’
IT’S the dark and twisted tale that’s taken on a life of its own. Baby reindeer is the sevenpart drama written by a comedian (who also plays the lead character) based on his reallife experiences with a female stalker — the fallout from which is now turning into a phenomenon that threatens to eclipse the original story.
When richard Gadd decided to turn his stalking ordeal into a work of performance art for the edinburgh Fringe five years ago, he surely never could have imagined the result would be a Netflix hit viewed nearly 60 million times in a month.
And certainly not that Fiona Harvey, the woman identified by online sleuths as his stalker, would end up outing herself this week in a TV interview with Piers Morgan — a spectacle that itself has now garnered five million views on YouTube.
Needless to say Harvey, 58, vehemently denies allegations that over four-and-a-half years she sent the 41,071 emails, 744 tweets, letters totalling 106 pages and 350 hours of voicemail messages, which is what Gadd says his stalker did. (Harvey admitted sending Gadd no more than ten emails, one letter and 18 tweets.)
But one thing is indisputable in this tangled web of claim and counter claim: Gadd’s background could not be in starker contrast to the chaotic and traumatic experiences charted in Baby reindeer (the show also documents in flashback how he is groomed and raped by a man he considered a friend, another experience based in reality).
As the Mail has discovered, Gadd’s middle- class childhood, growing up near the river Tay in Scotland, was anything but tortured.
Gadd, 34, grew up with his older sister Kate and parents — Geoff, a university professor and scientist, and Julia, a school secretary— in a large, detached home in Wormit, a village in North east Fife. There, he went to the local primary school, played football and tennis for the local club and made his first appearance treading the boards in his school nativity play as one of the Wise Men.
As he himself says: ‘I had a happy childhood, it was amazing, I wasn’t anxious at all.’
After primary school, Gadd moved on to Madras College, the alma mater of newsreader Alastair Stewart and singer KT Tunstall, a 1,400-strong comprehensive set in historic buildings in picturesque St Andrew’s.
It was at Madras that Gadd’s love of drama flourished (he dropped Latin in favour of drama) — not least when he landed the starring role of Macbeth in his final year.
There was an early taste of acclaim in the Madras 2005 Christmas newsletter, which remarked: ‘richard Gadd excelled in the title role. He delivered a wonderfully physical performance in which he was perfectly prepared to smash his head off the set when the role demanded it!’ The production also fuelled a school romance with his leading lady.
Another member of the cast this week spoke glowingly of his erstwhile school pal. ‘I’ve known him since we were five or six. We’re from the same village, went to the same primary school. I’m happy to see him doing so well and if I could speak for the people of Wormit, I’m sure everyone there is extremely proud to call him one of our own.’
And it would seem there are parallels between the young Gadd and his character Donny in Baby reindeer.
Just as Donny takes pity on Martha, offering her a cup of tea on the house when she appears at the pub where he is working, claiming to be a lawyer but seemingly unable to afford a drink, back in his school days Gadd was also quick to look out for the underdog, in this case his friend who was being bullied.
‘He stuck up for me when I was being bullied in secondary and nobody had done that for me before,’ says the friend, rob. ‘He was one of the good ones when I knew him.’
After Macbeth, and in their final year, rob and Gadd went on to take part in the National Theatre’s nationwide annual youth theatre festival Connections, winning leading roles in Gregory Burke’s play Liar.
‘I remember during our run of Liar we were approached by an agent who had seen the show; nothing ever came from it as far as I know, but I remember how buzzing the both of us were that we had been singled out.’
By Gadd’s own account: ‘ The drama department [at Madras] was like a gem, the teachers seemed to be above and beyond. They were inspirational to me,’ he said.
It was his parents who persuaded him that having a degree might be ‘wise’, although he has always insisted they were never pushy. He duly enrolled at Glasgow University, completing a degree in english Literature and Theatre Studies, apparently getting through it all without missing a single lecture or tutorial.
Already an avid writer, he started to perform at the edinburgh Fringe while still a student, winning the Laughing Penguin New Act of the Year award in 2010 and becoming a finalist in the Chortle Student Comedy Awards in 2011, competing against Mock The Week star Glenn Moore.
Gadd then left Glasgow for a year at oxford School of Drama, graduating in 2012. Since then his career has been one of steady — if less than conventional — ascendance, in both drama and comedy.
Subversive, dark, anti-comedy are just a few of the descriptions that have been applied to Gadd’s sometimes uncomfortable vein of stand-up. His breakthrough
‘Masculinity crisis’ followed sexual abuse
moment came in 2016 with his Fringe show Monkey See Monkey Do, a harrowing account of being sexually assaulted by an older man, made even more harrowing by the physical presence on stage of Gadd, pounding away on a treadmill, night after night, mile after mile, trying to escape a figure in a gorilla suit.
Gadd has said the abuse, which culminated in rape — it was not a single incident and he did not report it to police — led to a ‘masculinity crisis’. Once ‘quite a lad’, he said: ‘I would say that I certainly started to feel like my face didn’t fit in among the lad part of my life any more.’
The one-man show (he himself described it as ‘dark, off-kilter and weird’) won Gadd, who is bisexual, the Edinburgh Fringe comedy award and a £10,000 prize.
Gadd, now an ambassador for We Are Survivors, a charity dedicated to helping male survivors of sexual abuse, wrestled with what had happened — the treadmill prop in his show was apt, because the only way he could cope with crippling anxiety attacks was to run and run until he was too tired to think.
A devotee of meditation, he suffered anxiety, depression and has spoken of post-traumatic stress disorder. He has undergone extensive therapy.
One cathartic show based on his life experience was not enough, however, and Baby Reindeer, his one-man stage show, debuted at the Fringe in 2019, laying bare a new raft of deeply personal and deeply disturbing material.
For Gadd says that amid the success of Monkey See Monkey Do he was having to cope with being stalked.
As he told the Guardian: ‘It felt like I’d expunged the demons of one person who had caused me so much grief, only so that she [his stalker] could take centre stage in his place. It felt so awfully ironic.’
The events of Baby Reindeer are understood to have unfolded in the mid-2010s, in the years after Gadd left Oxford and moved to London, living for a time in leafy Muswell Hill and becoming an occasional barman at trendy Camden pub the Hawley Arms.
Gadd, whose career aspirations include wanting to play Hamlet with the Royal Shakespeare Company, has certainly found financial success since then.
According to Companies House, his eponymous company RRSG Ltd has just over £1 million in assets, which includes £819,959 ‘cash in the bank’. The firm’s profits in 2023 quadrupled from the previous year, as his show was picked up by Netflix.
He might have found financial success, but personal contentment appears to elude him still.
‘It’s not been an easy few years,’ said his mum
While Baby Reindeer also charts a relationship he had with a trans woman, he is currently single.
His parents remain his biggest supporters. In 2019 his dad wrote this proud post on Tw itter, now X: ‘My son has made number 4 in the List’s 2019 Hot 100. To my chagrin I am not in the top 3. Or even in the other 96.’
His mum, meanwhile, responded to a well-wisher the same year: ‘Thanks for the congratulations re Richard. It’s not been an easy few years but he’s become adept at changing horrendous experiences into award-winning shows.’
Baby Reindeer will likely be a shoo-in when it gets to awards season, but whether the fallout is now turning into a horrendous experience only he can say.
Following her interview with Piers Morgan, the world now knows the name Fiona Harvey, although Gadd has never identified his stalker.
While Baby Reindeer opens with the line ‘This is a true story’, Gadd said in an interview with GQ magazine that the focus of the Netflix show had been on ‘capturing the emotional truth, not creating a factual profile’.
He said: ‘We’ve gone to such lengths to disguise her that I doubt she would recognise herself.’ Earlier this week Netflix policy chief Benjamin King said the streamer and producer Clerkenwell Films had taken ‘every reasonable precaution in disguising the real-life identities of the people involved in that story’.
In retrospect, that seems disingenuous to say the least.