In Confidence
Click here to screen
Synopsis
Watch prominent figures speak out In Confidence

The show, which sets out to discover what motivates and inspires Britain’s most well-known personalities will be interrogating twelve brand new faces this series.



Season 2 interviews include: Sheila Hancock; Mike Leigh; Shirley Williams; Andre Previn; Christopher Hitchens; Peter Hitchens; Sir Peter Maxwell Davies; Danny Baker; Cleo Laine; Tracey Emin; Jackie Mason; Stephen Fry



Sheila Hancock Now in her eightieth year, Sheila Hancock is one of Britain’s most versatile and experienced actors. Since her West End debut in 1958, she’s appeared in countless stage plays, television sitcoms, and dramas, and her immense contribution to stage and screen has recently been recognised by the award of a CBE, and of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the film and television industry. In this interview, she talks about her life and career, and about her recent success as the writer of two critically-acclaimed volumes of autobiography. She unflinchingly discusses her many triumphs and occasional failures, her tempestuous marriage to actor John Thaw, and her battle with cancer, and talks about the deep depression she fell into after the death of her husband from the same condition.

Mike Leigh With a CV that includes such award-winning films as Vera Drake, Secrets and Lies, Naked, and Topsy Turvy, Mike Leigh has become one of the world’s most successful directors for stage and screen. He customarily begins each new project without a script, preferring instead to develop the scenes and dialogue through improvisation with the actors, a method that first brought him to public attention in 1977, with the hilarious satire on lower-middle-class pretensions, Abigail’s Party. In this interview, he talks about his Lancashire childhood, the development of his working method, and the international success he has enjoyed in the cinema. And he frankly discusses the difficulty of staying true to his preferred method of improvisation, when faced with the pressures and financial demands of Hollywood.

Baroness Shirley Williams As the daughter of a political scientist father, and a feminist author mother, Shirley Williams seems destined to have spent her entire adult lifetime immersed in British politics. She first entered Parliament as a Labour MP in 1964, and held cabinet posts under Wilson and Callaghan, but in 1981 – amid scenes of great bitterness – she resigned from the Labour party to become part of the “Gang of Four” who founded the SDP, and she now sits as a Liberal Democrat peer in the House of Lords. In this interview, she looks back at her part in the creation of the comprehensive education system, and at the crisis of conscience that left her (so she felt) with no option but to abandon the Labour party. And she talks frankly about the difficulties that those on the moderate left of her party have faced in recent years, since the Lib Dems entered into coalition government with the Conservatives.

Andre Previn The son of a Jewish immigrant family that fled Nazi Germany just before World War II, Andre Previn is justly celebrated as one of the most versatile and accomplished musicians in the USA. From film score arranger and jazz pianist, to symphony conductor and concert pianist, there’s scarcely an area of music-making in which he hasn’t excelled, although classical composition has always remained his first love. In this interview, he talks about his decision to abandon the financial security of Hollywood to pursue an international career as a conductor, about his difficult relationship with his father, and about the concertos, film scores, operas, and jazz recordings for which he would like to be remembered. Although, as he wryly concedes, many people will always remember him best for his hilarious appearance as “Andrew Preview” on BBC’s Morecambe and Wise Show, a cameo role which he still looks back on with great affection.

Peter Hitchens Although he was a Trotskyist at university, Peter Hitchens has developed over the subsequent four decades into one of Britain’s most persuasive and provocative advocates of traditional conservative values. A recent winner of the Orwell Prize for Journalism, he is widely respected as a distinguished columnist and author, yet he’s often been lampooned by his critics as “bonkers Hitchens,” because of his unapologetic belief in traditional Christian morality, his scepticism about Darwinian evolution, and his antipathy towards big government and the European Union. In this interview, he tells us that, far from hurting him, those insults are sure signs that his attacks on the liberal consensus are hitting home. And when this interview is watched alongside Laurie Taylor’s interview with his late brother Christopher (also in this series), it soon becomes clear that there is scarcely a subject on which his views, and those of his brother, are not diametrically opposed.

Christopher Hitchens After starting out on the far left of politics, the writer and author Christopher Hitchens spent his adult lifetime battling ceaselessly against all forms of totalitarianism. A fierce proponent of Enlightenment values, he argued not only against religious extremism, but against the existence of religion itself; and as a polemicist, he took aim at everyone from Mother Teresa and Henry Kissinger to Bill Clinton and Michael Moore. In mid-2010, he was diagnosed with an incurable form of cancer, and several months later he invited the In Confidence team to his house in Washington DC, to record a memorable and powerful interview. In it, he discussed his imminent death (which occurred in December 2011), dismissed conjecture that his terminal condition might have caused his combative view of the world to soften, and talked about his long-running feud with his staunchly conservative brother Peter (who is also interviewed in this series).

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies A founder member of the radical New Music Manchester group, Peter Maxwell Davies has always ploughed his own furrow in the contemporary classical music scene. He first achieved fame in the 1960s by composing dissonant, challenging, and harrowing music that intrigued and outraged audiences and critics in equal measure; yet after he moved to the Orkneys in the early 1970s, he discovered a more tranquil and peaceful form of musical expression, a change of style that soon led to his warm acceptance by the musical Establishment. In this interview, he talks about his progression from youthful enfant terrible to his appointment as Master of the Queen’s Music in 2004, and openly discusses the psychological collapse he suffered shortly before his move to the Orkneys. He also speaks about his gradual acceptance of his own homosexuality, about his anger at the damage that modern society inflicts upon the environment, and about what he regards as the immorality of the war in Iraq.

Danny Baker The son of a south London dock worker, Danny Baker left school at the age of fourteen, and went on to become one of Britain’s most gifted, popular, intelligent, and original radio broadcasters. He began his media career in print as a music journalist, and also enjoyed considerable success on television, but it’s on radio where he truly excels, generating more original ideas in a single programme than most broadcasters can manage in a lifetime. In this interview, he talks about his love of broadcasting, the brilliantly funny scripts that he regularly writes for other, more famous television personalities to read, and about whether his unique talents have received the full recognition that they undoubtedly deserve. The interview was recorded on the day before he was diagnosed with cancer of the mouth (a doubly cruel blow for such a celebrated talker), a condition that took him off the airwaves for more than six months, but from which he has since completely recovered.

Dame Cleo Laine Long recognised as one of the world’s great jazz singers, Cleo Laine did not even embark on her professional singing career until her mid-twenties. Since then, she’s more than made up for lost time, fronting the jazz bands formed by her late husband (John Dankworth) for almost sixty years, and also pursuing a hugely successful solo career being the only female performer ever to have received Grammy nominations in the jazz, popular, and classical categories. In this interview, she talks about her memorable performances in stage productions of Show Boat, The Seven Deadly Sins, and The Merry Widow, and about the racism she encountered as the child of mixed-race parents. And she talks frankly about her long public and private relationship with John, how she coped with the imperfections of married life, and with her decision to appear on stage just hours after his death.

Tracey Emin Ever since she first achieved fame as part of the Young British Artists movement, Tracey Emin has repeatedly put the most intimate aspects of her private life on public display. From her notorious artwork My Bed, which featured her own dirty unmade bed strewn with used condoms and blood-stained underwear, to her tent emblazoned with the names of everyone she had ever slept with, she has always been an artist whose own greatest work of art is herself. In this interview, she talks frankly about all aspects of her life and career, including the sexual abuse she suffered in her youth, and how she copes with being constantly in the public gaze. And she wonders if perhaps her deeper artistic message is sometimes lost amid the lurid and sensational media frenzy that always seems to accompany her work.

Jackie Mason In the words of the New York Times, Jackie Mason “has pursued the Jewish joke with a tenacity and single-mindedness that exceed those of anyone else in showbusiness.” Starting out as a rabbi in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, he soon resigned from his post (while remaining a firm believer), and moved into the world of stand-up comedy, where his politically incorrect material has divided opinion for over half a century. In this interview, he talks openly about his philosophy of life and of comedy, and about the praise and blame he’s received for expressing his views with such unflinching honesty. Some may hail him as a comedy genius, while others may denounce him as a right-wing racist, but he emerges from the interview as a man who is always true to himself, whatever the consequences.

Stephen Fry After an idyllic childhood, followed by a troubled adolescence that culminated in a three-month stay in prison for credit card fraud, Stephen Fry has gone on to attain the status of a much-loved “national treasure”. Although he’s only in his early fifties, he’s already enjoyed huge success as a novelist, actor, comedian, and raconteur, and was recently chosen by the British public as their “ideal Christmas dinner guest.” In this interview, he speaks bluntly about his dislike of critics and newspapers, and about the dark psychological mood swings to which he sometimes falls prey. And he rejects the charge that has often been levelled at him – that by spreading his considerable talents so thinly, he has become a jack of all trades, when he might have been a master of one.

Duration
12 x 60'
Definition
HD
Genre
Factual
Subgenre
Biography
Producer
ASSOCIATED-REDIFUSSION TV PROD