Interview copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2023

Looking back at his early interests as a boy, it might be easy to see how he got to be one of our country’s very finest television writers working in the detective and murder mystery genre. You know, I’ve always tried to be reasonably objective but having had the immense privilege of interviewing Russell Lewis so many times over the last decade, you may suspect that I’m guilty of a little bias and, of course, I confess that you may well be right – how could I not be after witnessing the inner workings of such a brilliant, cunning and dexterous mind firsthand and for so long?

Therefore, please don’t just take my word for it because I’ll always remember that his friend and close collaborator in crime, Damien Timmer, once told me that even before he met Russ for the first time, he knew that he had ‘the Midas Touch’ and that he was a ‘powerhouse of ideas and everyone adored him.’ Indeed, he continued: ‘Nothing else reads like a Russell script – the hugely evocative stage directions, the hinterland he gives all his characters, the way he combines real erudition with great populist story instincts, and his genius for plotting.’ So, there you are, like myself and everyone else who has had the pleasure of meeting him in person, even managing directors of hugely successful television production companies like Mr. Timmer confesses to being ‘a very starstruck fan.’

At the time though – looking back once more to somewhere around the early seventies and aged about nine or so – young Lewis must have seemed like a strange little fellow indeed to be wandering around WH Smith’s for hours on end enthralled by the Fontana editions of Agatha Christie with sensationally lurid covers by Tom Adams. On other occasions, he and his tutor would each take turns in reading aloud pages from Christie classics which surely gave him the shudders at such a young age but, crucially, also fired and furnished his immeasurable imagination.

A little later, hunting and tracking them down in charity shops and jumble sales, Russ would buy the books as gifts for himself that he has added to a collection built up over the years which he cherishes and still draws inspiration from to this very day. And, it is today that we receive one of our final gifts from Russ – the penultimate episode of Endeavour. However, just before we start the unwrapping, let’s first see what we can find as we have another rummage through that aforementioned brilliant, cunning and dexterous mind of his…

Confessions of a Scriptwriter

or, His Last Willing Testicle

~ An exclusive Endeavour interview with Russell Lewis ~

‘I’ve conducted some odd interviews in my time, matey. But stone me, this morning’s go takes the Garibaldi.’ – DS Jim Strange (SCHERZO)

DAMIAN: SCHERZO (S8:E2) opens at Cowley East Train Station where a taxi driver takes a young couple – Mr. and Mrs. Appleby – to Paradise Court, a nudist camp. Along the way, we see another taxi driver pull up alongside a woman who is learning to drive with the NOGLEA school of motoring. Waiting at a set of traffic lights, she sensually touches up her lipstick as her instructor looks on somewhat bemused while Brian – the aforementioned second taxi driver also waiting at the lights – shows his approval with lewd, flirtatious facial gestures and by over-revving his car engine. Unimpressed by his desperate display of machismo, she speeds off as soon as the light turns green and almost knocks Lee Timothy, a window cleaner, off his bicycle…

Although your casual allusions to the pop culture of the period have been a constant in Endeavour from the very beginning – Confessions of a Window Cleaner (1974), Confessions of a Driving Instructor (1976) and Carry On Camping (1969) in this particular scene – it’s the fact that this opening has the general tone of a seventies sex comedy that some viewers may have found a little jarring.

Russ, you’ve given us many unusual gifts over the years ranging from unexpected stocking fillers such as all singing and dancing musical numbers, puppets and even a certain tiger! – some were more welcome than others but it’s always the thought that counts. Nevertheless, what’s going on with this opener to SCHERZO and is your Dark Passenger on the right pills?

RUSS: It arose from research, really. I’d got hold of a few magazines from the year in question that I’d remembered from boyhood – Titbits and Weekend, and, of course, Reveille – and really, they’re quite extraordinary. Titbits, especially. On one level – kind of Dick Emery hilarious, and on another – certainly to modern sensibilities – quite, in the mot de nos jours  ‘problematic’. There’s one front page in particular of a kind of driving lesson or driving test scenario. I think the pitch is about that staple of club comics of the time – ‘Women Drivers’. But it’s illustrated with a very, and I use the period vernacular, ‘busty’ examinee/learner behind the wheel more or less toppling out of her low cut dress and the examiner/instructor, a middle-aged man in a heavy brown suit, sweating profusely and getting hot under the collar at sight of his examinee/learner’s ‘ample charms.’ It’s just staggering to the modern eye.  

The whole story really came together from that. It seemed to say so much about our relationship to sex then. The whole mag – those parts not concerned with adverts for joining the armed services – pretty much drips with the same kind of queasy furtiveness. It’s seaside postcard/McGill but gone rancid. You can imagine our friend Bob Rusk tutting disapproval in the newsagents at such sauciness on public display. Shame and guilt loom large.

I think there is a distinction to be made. The Confessions series has a comedic charm in a way that a ‘sex’ scene in the On the Buses movie, say, just doesn’t. Most of the time, in the Confessions series, the butt – and I use the term advisedly – of the joke is the scrapes that Timothy Lea gets into. Whereas, Bob Grant’s Jack rolling about on a bed fully clothed with a woman in a negligee, and rolling his eyes in orgasmic delight from having done nothing more than bitten his partner’s bare shoulder before collapsing back ‘spent’ – is just bizarre.

I looked at the Adventures series, too – particularly Barry Evans in Adventures of a Taxi Driver – and that was another piece of the jigsaw. On the one hand – and I grant that we were getting ahead of ourselves so far as the movies were concerned, but given that Confessions of a Window Cleaner was in print, it felt like fair grist to the mill – you had this Weekend/Titbits level of titillation, Benny Hill, Madeleine Smith’s damsel in distress in the Two Rons serial. All good clean family fun, while at the other end of the scale, you had the Dirty Squad in Soho – the Obscene Publications boys – absolutely up to their necks in gangland corruption. All of it made possible through British society’s often frankly gruesome relationship with matters of a sexual nature.

So – on the one level, there’s this almost prim and innocent Health & Efficiency, back to Eden type thing with the nudists – another staple of British comedy at the time – and on another level the wholesale importation of European pornography made possible by the utter corruption of certain departments within the Met, ‘adult’ shops, Soho gangland, and the plastic mac brigade, with the world of Raymond’s Revue Bar somewhere in the middle of that sliding scale. It’s the sensibility of Eric Idle’s character in the ‘Nudge-nudge’ sketch, too.

All of that felt like very fertile ground for a crime story.

DAMIAN: Can you explain your obvious affliction, oops, sorry, I meant affection for both the Carry On and Confessions series and also what you think the films might tell us about the cinema-going audience of the early seventies?

RUSS: I think they’re a pretty reliable barometer of public taste and to a lesser degree mores at any particular time. With Carry Ons that’s easier to see as they cover a much wider timescale. There’s a world of difference between Constable or Sergeant, say, and Emmanuelle. You can probably trace a direct line back to Canterbury Tales insofar as it was a collection of archetypes – actually, much further – back to the Romans and the Greeks with Lysistrata.

As a London and Home Counties boy, I’m especially fond of them for the time machine quality of their location work. And that’s something one finds again with the Confessions and Adventures series. It’s a landscape I recognise and remember. 

DAMIAN: Stone me, Hancock’s Half Hour is another fixation of yours that has cropped up over the years so you must be aware one of those episodes feature reference to films entitled Nudist Paradise and Around the World With Nothing On?

RUSS: We did try to use Lady Don’t Fall Backwards by D’arcy Sarto elsewhere – but just at the time that an ‘actual’ version of it came out in print.  

DAMIAN: There must have been some sniggering whilst filming the scenes at Paradise Court?

RUSS: I wasn’t there, so couldn’t speak to that – but I think it’s unlikely. Such things would be handled as a matter of course with great sensitivity.

DAMIAN: And nevermind facemasks, the extras at the nudist resort were obviously wearing nothing at all! The on set COVID Compliance Officer must have had their sanitised hands full?

RUSS: Phwoaaar!  

DAMIAN: In addition to yourself, I know that both Shaun Evans and Roger Allam have always maintained that you never wanted to repeat yourselves with Endeavour which is admirable. However, I wonder how not wanting to repeat yourself sits with sticking to the formula of what audiences expect from a Sunday night detective drama and do the sort of aforementioned diversions and detours possibly suggest a boredom with the material?

RUSS: I’d hope that my initial explanation would go some way towards shooting that one down. There was a very serious theme underpinning the story. And I like to think all of us treated such a delicate story with the care it warranted. You have to look past the decoration – which often serves to keep the viewer wrong footed – to what’s going on underneath. Distraction is a very potent device in the arsenal of legerdemain. Look at this – don’t look at that. Think about that – don’t think about this.

DAMIAN: I suppose another more generous way of looking at this is that these sort of shenanigans – while they would never have occurred in either Inspector Morse or Lewis – prove that your take on Colin Dexter’s Oxford is much more flexible which is why – in my humble opinion, at least – this is just one of the reasons why Endeavour has surpassed both of its predecessors. What are your thoughts on this?

RUSS: Well – I think they’re three very different shows, made at different times. I don’t think one can fairly compare them. Without Morse, no Lewis, and without either of those there’s no Endeavour. So, though it’s very generous of you to say so, in all conscience I couldn’t concur. Pick a favourite child. I genuinely don’t think any of us involved have ever thought of it in those terms.  

But to your point about where each series could go. I’d probably point to Cherubim as atypical. Promised Land also went outside the expected ‘safe operating procedure’. Triumphantly, I’m my view. And Lewis could go out there. Tonally – there’s always been room in Endeavour for us to have a little bit more humour – both light and dark.

With regard to the case in point. Don’t forget that the Morse of the novels was not averse to flicking through the pages of top-shelf, monodextrous literature. In fact, I’m sure there’s a reference in one of the books to his greatest shame being caught perusing the same in the local newsagents by a couple of uniform coppers.

DAMIAN: Of course, as I’ve said to you before, another reason that I believe Endeavour is by far the best of the three screen adaptations of Dexter’s work is that there is far more focus on developing the characters and we have an two excellent examples of this in this film with Endeavour and his stepmother and also Joan and Strange which we’ll discuss first.

Having agreed to be his dinner date in the previous film, Strange arrives at Joan’s flat dressed in a tuxedo and carrying a bunch of flowers for her. He nervously straightens his jacket before ringing the doorbell and when he finally does, Joan appears in her dress and Strange can’t help but stare in wonder. Later, at the Masonic Lodge, they have a lovely time and dance together while the band performs “Earth Angel” which ends with the lyrics, ‘A fool in love’ as we cut to Endeavour staggering around drunk before getting knocked over by a taxi – the irony!

Additionally, in the final scene of SCHERZO, Endeavour says, ‘Well, I’m not the fool I was’ to which Thursday replies, ‘I quite liked that fool. He hoped for the best in people.’ Now, perhaps we’d better move along faster than a DMC-12 with a flux capacitor, but will you tell me who the fool in love is at this particular moment in time?

RUSS: We’ve been very lucky to be able to put the stories out in an order – a luxury denied to Morse and Lewis – but one, I think, due to the changing times. Going back right to the start, I’d picked up on things as a viewer that suggested ongoing story and greater character development was something in which the modern audience was more invested than at the time of either of the preceding shows.

Who the fool in love is? All of us, probably – at one time or another.

DAMIAN: Why did Endeavour go to see Joan at her flat and having discovered she was out with some bloke in an evening suit, not leave a message?

RUSS: Whatever he might’ve had to say died on his tongue when he learned she was out with someone else.

DAMIAN: It would have been amusing if the taxi that hit Endeavour was the same one taking Strange and Joan home.

RUSS: I like coincidence as much as the next man, but that one might have got me drummed out of the academy. Coincidence has always been a hard sell with Mr. E.

DAMIAN: As Joan is dropped off at her flat, she kisses Strange on the cheek and he says, ‘Blimey, I won’t wash my face for a week now.’ This was a scene with the exact same dialogue that was cut from a script from many series ago and isn’t it funny to recall that Endeavour, Strange and two girls – one of which was Joan – all went on a double date in NOCTURNE (S2:E2).

You once told me that you knew Joan and Endeavour would fall for each other the moment she first opened the front door to him in FUGUE (S1:E2), but at what point did you have the idea for Joan and Strange to become romantically involved with each other?

RUSS: Perhaps unwise to get ahead of ourselves, but the possibility would have existed from the off. Rather like the Big Bang. Planck time – which is nothing to do with Eric Sykes. So closely do things come into being, that it’s almost impossible to offer a reliable breakdown of when which elements arrived in which order but I remember talking about it at an early readthrough. 

DAMIAN: Let’s now take a look at when Gwen unexpectedly comes to stay with Endeavour…

ENDEAVOUR: There’s more to the world than you find in Reveille, Gwen.

GWEN: And you’d know all about it, I’m sure. Because you went to Oxford. But you didn’t finish it, though, did you? For all your books and your poetry and your snooty music, you failed.

ENDEAVOUR: Yep! I failed. I should have stayed at home and drove a taxi, like my father. And then got one of the local girls knocked up. Then you could look down your nose at me, and all would be well in your tiny, little world.

GWEN: You were always a strange one. Close and private. Filled with your sweaty, little secrets. You were a disappointment to him.

ENDEAVOUR: So you said.

GWEN: A big disappointment.

ENDEAVOUR: So you said.

GWEN: I didn’t kill her!

ENDEAVOUR: What?

GWEN: I didn’t give her cancer. And you can’t blame me all your life.

ENDEAVOUR: I’ve got work to do. Goodnight, Gwen.

GWEN: We took you in.

DAMIAN: Stunning scene. Now, you’ll have to forgive me as I get increasingly confused between the novels, original series and also the various different drafts of Endeavour scripts that I’ve read over the years together with ideas that you’ve told me about but never actually made it to the screen, but isn’t there quite a bit of original detail in this film regarding the family not found elsewhere that you’ve personally added to the Morse mythology?

RUSS: Perhaps. It’s one interpretation of the information available. There are things not covered in the novels or the TV show that give one some leeway. And Endeavour’s account of the imaginary life Gwen would have liked for him contains a bit of a pot shot at Gwen herself – having been a local girl. Had Morse père got her knocked up? But it sort of also speaks to the veneer of respectability that some people want to claim for themselves by mere dint of being a generation removed. Hence her being able to look down her nose at Endeavour – at least as he imagines she would – for essentially replicating his father’s behaviour.

It’s quite knotty – psychologically. 

DAMIAN: I know that you originally wrote an entire speech for HOME (S1:E4) in which Endeavour lays bare his soul – including describing his feeling at having lost Susan, he asks, ‘Is that how it was for you?’ – but is only able to communicate his emotions to his father while he was comatose and obviously not able to respond which ended up being cut at the request of both Shaun Evans and the director.

Maybe not every question gets an answer, but I’m not entirely sure what the relationship was between Cyril and Gwen – were they actually happy together or did he never really stop loving Endeavour’s mother?

RUSS: We’re into quite treacherous ground here. Potentially. It’s something to do with generation and class, and the prevailing ‘What will the neighbours say?’ morality of the time. A sense that Cyril had made his bed – quite literally – and had now better lie in it.

Having had a strained relationship with Cyril, for my money, right at the end, Endeavour desperately needed that question answered. He needed to know if it was something he shared with his father – that he was still in love with a woman who had slipped forever beyond his reach. If I remember, he never got his answer because the only time he could ask the question was when Cyril was too far gone to reply.

Endeavour needed to know if he and Cyril were the same. If they were both cursed.

I think the damaged child, the romantic in Endeavour, very likely hung on to the notion that Cyril still loved his mother in some way. It’s a sort of arrested emotional development. The child who hopes that Mummy and Daddy will somehow get back together again, and the prelapsarian idyll will be restored. Things appear to be a lot healthier nowadays, so far as societal shame and guilt are concerned – with, I think, the data suggesting that children growing up with both birth parents living together is now the minority.  

But then – and I can only speak to the early 60s and 70s – so one must multiply that by an order of magnitude for the 40s/early 50s when Cyril and Endeavour’s mum went their separate ways – the social stigma then around divorce was unimaginable. For Endeavour, it would have been whispers in the playground – looks and nods in the street. A certain pursed-lips reserve in the butchers when he went shopping with his mother – as if people feared contagion. Divorce. Unmarried pregnancy. Two sides of the same coin. The fear of being found wanting and becoming an outcast from the tribe. People moved away. They left one part of the country for another to escape the disapproval and stigma. But it’s about class. And the fear of ruin. Poor Fanny Robin in Far From the Madding Crowd. It goes back to Thursday’s quotation of the old song, “She Was Poor But She Was Honest” – ‘It’s the same the whole world over, it’s the poor what gets the blame, it’s the rich what gets the pleasure, ain’t it all a bloomin’ shame.’

Whatever Cyril’s feelings, I imagine any regrets he may have had were turned into an inescapable sense of guilt by her death. There was nothing then that he could ever put right. They never got to a place of forgiveness and acceptance of changed circumstances. And, of course, that brought Endeavour full time into their lives. Gwen, forever the scarlet woman who could never live up to his sainted mother. It’s a Wednesday Play, really – isn’t it?

I don’t think it was a madly happy house.

DAMIAN: Father and son relationships can be difficult at the best of times but did Cyril love Endeavour and was he actually disappointed with his son or is Gwen just trying to hurt him?

RUSS: Endeavour was an inescapable daily reminder of what had been. A living rebuke – whether the rebuke was intended or not. I think everything between them was coloured by that.

DAMIAN: Endeavour clearly misses his mother most but to what extent does he love his father and stepmother?

RUSS: It’s a mess, isn’t it? I suspect he doesn’t know what he’s expected to feel, and consequently feels very little. Ambivalence. Perhaps there comes a point for some children who aren’t gaining whatever emotional nourishment or attention they need from a parent, that they simply stop trying to gain the thing which is being withheld. They withdraw from engagement and fall back upon self-reliance.

And you thought this story was just a bit of salacious titty-bum-bum fluff!

DAMIAN: Me, Sir? Never! Anyway, after finding little Mark Lunn – with the gun – at the murder site of the boy’s father, Endeavour tells him: ‘Your mum and dad getting divorced had nothing to do with anything that you said or did, or didn’t do or say. Do you understand?’ Not only did they both have divorced and now deceased taxi drivers as fathers, when the scene ends with Endeavour telling little Lunn with the gun to ‘Go in and give your mum a hug. Tell her you love her.’, doesn’t he seem to be thinking aloud as much as actually talking to the boy?

RUSS: He’s always trying to fix the past in the present.

DAMIAN: Another scene that beautifully touches on the theme of difficult relationships between fathers and their children is between Bright and the life model in the art class, Lynn Parry, who also appeared in Blue Movies and turns out to be the daughter of the killer in this film:

LYNN: Dad? What does that even mean? I barely remember him.

BRIGHT: Perhaps. But he never forgot you.

LYNN: Well, maybe it would have been better for everyone if he had.

BRIGHT: Something far easier said than done for any father.

LYNN: What can you think of me?

BRIGHT: I think you’re an intelligent, sensitive, young woman who fell amongst scoundrels. Any shame is on their side. Not yours.

Lynn then kisses him softly on the cheek and thanks him. As was the case between Bright and Shirley Trewlove, he once again seems able to relate particularly well with young women and gain their trust and confidence. Surely, this can’t just be put down to the fact that he simply lost his own daughter?

RUSS: Perhaps every young woman of a certain age he sees could have been Dulcie. I think that’s the thing. So he treads gently.  

DAMIAN: Since when did Bright paint?

RUSS: Before life and parental disapproval stamped that particular dream into the dirt.

DAMIAN: Had a life model in the art class posed nude, Bright wouldn’t have painted them would he?

RUSS: I think, with the bereavement, he’s rediscovered a part of himself he’d forgotten about. I don’t know if it made the cut – thinking about it, I’m almost certain that it didn’t – but there was a scene, I think in FILM 1, which was culled for budgetary/scheduling reasons – you’ll find the one usually feeds into the other – where Bright finds his old painting kit in the wardrobe while clearing out Mrs. Bright’s old clothes. We covered it off in dialogue, but the optimal iteration would have been to see that moment with Anton.

It’s always difficult to get everything – but those little vignettes which say so much with so little are often casualties. It does make you want to kick the office apart, because you’ve taken great pains to lay the groundwork with a deal of subtlety – and all that careful crafting so often goes for naught, and consequently folk think you’ve just been slipshod on the page or in the plotting. Show show show not tell. But – them’s the breaks. You have to grow a fairly chitinous carapace.

So – yes, I think he probably would have painted a nude life model. Which is sort of what the story was exploring. If you put quote marks around a thing and call it “Art” – it’s perfectly acceptable. Rather like those who might stand too close to The Flying Scotsman – smut is in the eye of the beholder. While at the other end of the scale, you’ve got the criminality that surrounds Dinner For Three.  

Originally, the story was a much more Golden Age puzzle, which really played into the (spoiler alert) clock hands code. And the finale all played out at the location where Dinner For Three was filmed. A much bigger denouement, which at one stage involved Lynn being brought to the location, and the killer being confronted with her. But very late in the shooting schedule there was a lot of pushback. As I’ve mentioned previously – over the years the boys have been less disposed to the grand-standing reveal of the intricately plotted solution to the mystery, and this was a good late example of that.  

So – the request was to simplify the puzzle wholesale, and reduce the semaphore/Signals aspect hugely, and also – for reasons I was never quite able to fathom – not to do it at the location. One’s obliged to make such requests work, and you certainly throw the kitchen sink at solving the problem to everyone’s satisfaction, typically against the unforgiving minute, but as the designer of an already airworthy craft, whether the product of the redrawn blueprint lands safely or not, you can always hear what – if only to your ears – will forever be a squeaky wheel.

DAMIAN: I’ve highlighted a couple of instances in the past where I believed art was imitating life but you almost always dismiss them as coincidence. However, we learn that during the war – when a man kept asking if he could measure her feet! – Win Thursday was in Blackpool with the Auxiliary Territorial Service and, of course, Caroline O’Neill was born and lived in Blackpool for some time and also in this film, when Strange says that, ‘I’ve conducted some odd interviews in my time, matey. But stone me, this morning’s go takes the Garibaldi’, I know for a fact – because Sean Rigby told me so himself years ago – that the Garibaldi is his favourite biscuit. Well?

RUSS: I genuinely didn’t know that about Riggers. Garibaldi is just a standard comedy biscuit. It probably owes more to the great Alexei Sayle. And I don’t think I knew that about Caro. However, the ‘measure your feet’ thing was perfectly true. It happened to a close member of my family at about this time.  

DAMIAN: Although I won’t be asking what size shoes you wear, I would be curious to learn what your favourite biscuit might be?

RUSS: At risk of sounding like EL Wisty, shoe sizes are really quite interesting from a whodunuit point of view. Perhaps more so now in the modern age, insofar as they’re madly unreliable and seem to vary according to manufacturer. Even within the same manufacturer, sizing appears to drift across the years. Either that or my feet are still growing. Is that another thing with old men? Ears, noses, and now feet? So, that impression of a size 9 in the flowerbed outside the downstairs window of the remote country house and faithfully cast in plaster by the Scene of Crime team… is now probably a little less reliable than it once was. 

Biscuits? We appear to have taken a turn towards Smash Hits. How long have you got? ANZAC biscuits are first rate for dunking. I had a friend who could source American Girl Guide cookies briefly every year when they had their fundraiser on. The Majestic Digestive, of course. King of Biscuits. Should have been painted by Landseer in a Highland Glen. 

Alongside Rigger’s favourite, we mostly had Custard Creams when I was a boy. Wouldn’t give them house room now. Don’t think I’ve touched one since. Pretty grim confection, in my humble opinion. I liked the popular Spoonerism Peek Freans. You’ve got to go a long way to beat a Family Assortment. Something for everyone. Probably explains a lot about why we did the Creswell’s/Chigton Green story. Fig Rolls were popular, then, too. A biscuit surely born of the English 19th century obsession with the bowels. Half Man, Half Biscuit, Half Victorian Purgative.  

DAMIAN: And favourite sandw… Oh, why bother? And there’s probably not much point in asking what you can tell us about the penultimate Endeavour either?

RUSS: I’m very wary of giving away too much. Art imitates life imitates art imitates life. Might be easier to talk about next week. But there is a bit of creative Last Will and Testament about it. I suppose I was aware of the window of opportunity closing – almost but not quite shut. I was talking about this with Kate Saxon who directs next week’s finale. She was asking if I was down-hearted about it coming to an end. And, I think rather like Shaun, I’m genuinely not. That said, I’m very aware that I’ll never have a sandpit like it to play in again. Something about the design allowed us to push things into some unexpected places, but without ever breaking it or doing it a lasting damage. The audience has been wonderful in sticking with us and following us into those unexpected places. It’s always felt like they’ve trusted us to go off the beaten path, because they know we’ll bring them safely back home in time for tea. So – tonight is just more of my nonsense, essentially. A blend of things. Stuff happens, then the credits roll.

DAMIAN: Listen, even though I’ve been asking nicely for the best part of ten years, you’re obviously never going to tell me so I wondered, in the extremely unlikely event I ever managed to get hold of Mr. Allam and interview him, would even he be able to finally reveal what the Wednesday special is?

RUSS: Almost certainly… not.

~

Interview copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2023