AMANDA REDMAN: ‘METOO HAD TO HAPPEN, BUT I MISS THE JOSHING ON SET’
Amanda Redman is at pains to assure me that her new Channel 5 crime drama, adapted from the Reverend Richard Coles’s novel Murder Before Evensong, is not in any way cosy. “Absolutely not,” she says of a storyline in which the village vicar, Daniel Clement, becomes embroiled in a murder investigation after he finds his church warden stabbed to death with a pair of secateurs next to one of the pews.
Surely she protests too much? After all, the setting is 1980s thatched-roof bucolic, the cast of characters includes the local lord of the manor and the simmering plot partly pivots on a proposal to replace the flower room in the church with a new lavatory.
Is there, perhaps, a smidgen of snobbery within actors towards the seemingly unkillable cosy crime genre that has wrapped itself around the TV schedules like bindweed? “I think there might be something in that,” Redman gamely concedes. “But cosy crime is about jolly old ladies sitting around in cardigans. Ours is much darker, more The Wicker Man [the 1973 British folk horror film]. The key question is: is it believable? And I’d argue Midsomer Murders, and many of the cosy crime shows like it, are not.”
On this, the former New Tricks star may have a point. And Redman is right to assert that Murder Before Evensong is at times pretty dark: inspired by Coles’s own experiences as a gay man growing up during the Aids crisis (and on whose real mother, Redman’s character Audrey, mother of Daniel, is based), the TV adaptation tackles church homophobia and the odd buried secret from the Second World War within a viperish churchgoing rural community. “I lost a lot of friends during the Aids crisis,” Redman says. “At one point, it felt as though I was going to a funeral every week. So the story was important to me. I don’t think the younger generation today has any understanding of what went on.”
Redman, a reliable TV presence since the 1980s and also well known for the ITV sitcom At Home with the Braithwaites, has a blast playing Audrey, an acidic-tongued bullet-proof widow whom she describes as “the sort of can-do ATS [Auxiliary Territorial Service] vet who can strip down an engine in seconds”. Having instead become a frustrated and disappointed housewife, Audrey is nonetheless blessed with the show’s most entertaining lines, and Redman delivers them with lip-smacking pleasure, like a cat purring over cream.
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Middle-aged women on screen
She is 68 and her wide-set, almond-shaped eyes are as distinctive as ever, perpetually raised in vaguely saucy merriment, as though in demure but playful challenge. Yet like so many actresses of her generation, she bemoans the lack of roles on screen and stage for women in late middle age.
“It’s partly because we no longer have the regional theatres in the way we used to,” she says. “The Helen Mirrens of this world are rare. It’s changing, but it’s slow. I remember about 10 years ago coming up with a TV idea about a menopausal woman. And the producers I was talking to almost spit into their coffee. Even though we now have the streaming channels, everything is geared to a particular age group. But it’s always been a bit like that.”
I tell her I had heard rumours that the BBC was even frustrated that New Tricks, the hit Noughties comedy about a cold-case police department staffed by three retired detectives, in which Redman starred alongside Alun Armstrong and the much missed Dennis Waterman, was a hit with older viewers, outperforming shows such as Doctor Who.
“That’s completely true, they were,” she says. “I’d think to myself, well, why did you commission it if that’s how you feel about older people? My husband is a businessman [she has been married to Damian Schnabel since 2010; she was formerly married to the actor Robert Glenister, with whom she has a daughter, Emily] and he used to say that their attitude didn’t make any sense. If you’ve got a successful product, who cares who’s watching it? But it did at least attract older actors.”
She still badly misses Waterman, who died in 2022. “He was a very important person in my life. His wife phoned me to say that he was dying. She said, ‘I didn’t want you learn about it on the news’. The very next day, I turned on the radio, and heard that he was dead.”
Redman has a terrible childhood injury to thank for her route into acting. At the age of 18 months, she pulled a pot of boiling soup over herself at the family home in Brighton and suffered burns to 75 per cent of her body. She was rushed to the pioneering burns and reconstructive unit at Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead, which played a pivotal role in treating RAF aircrew during the war, and spent most of the following three years on a hospital ward.
“When I was released, as I call it, I wasn’t allowed to do things that lots of young children were, such as go running or climb trees, in case I scraped my skin and it became infected. But I had all this pent-up energy, so at the age of five my parents sent me to ballet classes. After a few lessons, my teacher politely suggested I might be better suited to the acting classes taking place upstairs. And that was it. I was hooked. I never wanted to do anything else.”
Today, only a large scar across her left arm remains. “It’s funny, because when I look at that I don’t feel anything at all. But when the tiniest wrinkle appears on my face I go, ‘What the f--- is that?!’”
Changing times
At Bristol Old Vic drama school, from which she graduated in the early 1970s, her peers included Miranda Richardson, Greta Scacchi and Daniel Day-Lewis. “Dan was a bit Goth. He’d wander around in white, flowering shirts and black eyeliner. Very Byron-esque. I suppose he still is.”
She went straight into repertory theatre, as was the norm under Equity rules at the time, before establishing what has become a solid career on TV with early appearances on BBC dramas such as Oxbridge Blues (1984) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1986). The rep system was later effectively dismantled after Thatcher took on the unions during the 1980s, yet like so many actors of her generation, she credits it with giving her a training that she argues many of today’s graduates lack.
“It gave you an incredible discipline. You would not dream of doing a lot of the things that some of the young actors of today take as their right.” Such as complaining about working hours? “Such as complaining about anything! In those days, it was never about the money. Fame was almost a dirty word.”
So much, she agrees, has changed. “You had deep respect for directors back then. Producers would leave directors alone. It was always their vision. These days it’s all done by committee.” And she misses a lot of the banter that used to take place on set before the era of MeToo. “MeToo had to happen, but a lot of the joshing [between actors] has gone. It’s a huge shame, because creatively you kind of need that. It must be really hard for men today. They don’t know what to say.”
The platonic dynamic between men and women, she says, has shifted. “The other day I bumped into an old friend whom I hadn’t seen since before Covid. We went to give each other a hug and then stopped and said, ‘Oh, are we allowed to do this anymore?’ We’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater.”
Not that, she is at pains to add, she is advocating a return to the handsy 1980s. “Oh god, no. [Sexual harassment] was the norm. You’d say to your fellow actresses, ‘Oh he came on to me again today.’ It was simply accepted.” She once had an audition with a BBC director, who she won’t name, who asked her to remove her trousers “because they would look better on the floor”. “That went a bit far and my agent got involved. I remember only being upset that I might have talked myself out of a job. But we all learnt to say, ‘Just f--- off’. It toughened you up.”
‘British TV could do better’
Redman certainly comes across as tough, resigned to the challenges that come with a rapidly evolving industry, yet unafraid to speak her mind. “TV in general has raised its game since the streamers came along,” she says. “But I still think [British TV] could do better. There needs to be much more bravery. [The BBC and ITV] shouldn’t pander to fashion.”
What about the rise of AI, does she fear that? “I’ve been doing voice-overs for years, and I’ve certainly noticed that it is beginning to affect that. And my American colleagues are seriously worried.”
Does she think the Government ought to be doing more to protect the creative industries? “They’ve never protected the creative sector! It’s been s--- on for so long. Margaret Thatcher s--- on it from a great height when I was younger. And it’s heartbreaking, given that we are a country that has produced so much. You can see it in the number of tourists that swarm Stratford and the Lake District so it’s awful that we don’t seem to see it ourselves.”
She continues to “keep her hand in”, as she puts it. She starred in four seasons of ITV’s medical drama The Good Karma Hospital, and last year appeared in Scoop, the Netflix film about the 2019 Prince Andrew BBC interview in which he admitted his friendship with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. “I want to be part of that because I was hoping something might come out of it as a result, but alas it didn’t,” she says. “I think all that is locked too deep [inside the establishment].”
These days, she only takes projects she is interested in. “So many of the scripts I get are really patronising. But I’m lucky, I’m in a position in which I can choose. At this stage in my career, there really is no point in doing stuff that isn’t good.”
Murder Before Evensong begins on Channel 5 on Tuesday, October 7 at 9pm
2025-10-04T07:00:55Z
