Lights, camera, action man

Tom Bradby has gone from being shot on the frontline to firing questions at Prince William. Now the war reporter turned royal favourite has adapted his gritty IRA novel for the big screen. Simon Mills meets a thoroughly charming Renaissance man

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Simon Mills

17 August 2012

One of those fantastic instances of Hollywood happenstance occurs during my interview with Tom Bradby.

We’ve already been talking for an hour in a Soho hotel lounge when I become aware that the sturdy presence of action man Jason Statham has entered the room. It seems too stellar an opportunity to pass up, so, much to bashful and well-brought-up Bradby’s embarrassment, I swing round, channelling Robert Altman’s The Player, and tell Statham all about ITV’s political reporter turned scriptwriter’s unbearably tense but profoundly affecting new film Shadow Dancer, set in Northern Ireland during the tail end of the Troubles in the early 1990s. ‘Hey!’ I say. ‘You guys should work together.’

The Transporter actor mutters something about talented scriptwriters being a rarity in Hollywood, but giving Sherborne and Edinburgh University–educated Bradby the quick once-over, taking in his clean-shaven, public schoolboy face, floppy hair and Fulham estate agent’s clobber and the girly high tea on the table in front of him, he appears unconvinced this man would have the chops for his particular brand of face-breaking blockbuster.

In truth, of course, it is a case of wolf in Foxton’s clothing. Bradby, the TV journo/novelist/scriptwriter/talkshow host/royal favourite, is actually the real hard man of the pair. He may not look buff or aggressive enough to join The Expendables, but ITV’s political editor has had the brass neck, bullish irreverence and cojones to confront presidents and prime ministers (‘I asked you to be candid… you’re not being candid, are you, Mr Brown?’). He has been embedded in conflict zones from Ulster to East Timor, mingled with Afghan warlords and IRA terrorists, and has been shot at by rioters in Indonesia. ‘Which I have to say, hurt rather a lot,’ he says with charming understatement.

I ask Tom to elaborate on this agonising, career-galvanising incident, mainly because I want tough-guy actor Statham to hear.

Back in 1999, as ITV’s Asia correspondent (now 45, he’s been at ITN for 22 years), Bradby was covering a demonstration against the newly elected President Abdurrahman Wahid in a square outside Jakarta’s parliament building. It was dark and he suddenly found himself alone, without body armour or a mobile phone. Out of nowhere, a protestor fired from close range. ‘All I saw was what looked like a firework coming towards me,’ says Bradby.

A crude but brutally lethal rocket flare — a spike attached to a ball and chain with a burning phosphorus rag wrapped around it — struck the middle of his right leg, just below the knee. ‘I remember thinking how when we’d had our third child I looked at my poor beloved wife in terrible childbirth pain and thought to myself, “Wow, I wonder what it is like to be in that much agony.” Well, now I knew.’

At first, the doctors told him amputation was a likely outcome, but the local hospital’s surgical expertise, garnered from frequent motorbike-accident victims, saved his leg. The ugly injury proved to be a turning point and Bradby — whose favourite film was The Year of Living Dangerously — began to ask himself more and more questions. ‘You go through all sorts of psychological battles in your head, trying to assess the true nature of the danger, what the risk really is. Isn’t it risky to ride a motorbike or cross the road? Can I really do my very dangerous job in a safe way?’

His experiences in Northern Ireland, arriving in August 1993, ‘just as the first stirrings of the peace process had begun, but with the Troubles still going full tilt,’ had been similarly precarious.

In his Belfast flat, Bradby moved the landline as far away from his bedroom as possible, because every night it would ring off the hook, telling of yet another killing, bomb blast or doorstep execution. ‘You had to assess the significance of each tragedy, whether it was worth hauling yourself out of bed and getting a camera crew together for, or just going off on your own. What didn’t change was the unremitting misery of the person who had seen their husband or boyfriend shot dead outside their home.’ He would mix with members of the IRA, Sinn Fein, the intelligence services, police and informers; figures whose dialogue and stories would later go on to make up the central premise for the book and soon-to-be-released film of Shadow Dancer.

At that time, the prospect of working far away from his London family seemed more serious than ever, and before he would head off for somewhere volatile, Bradby found he couldn’t sleep. ‘I’d sneak into my kids’ room and lie down on the floor next to their beds, staring at them as they slept, convincing myself I was never going to see them again.’

Being shot, he says, did two things. ‘Part of me thought, “This is fantastic! I am invincible! I got shot and I survived. I can do anything!” The other part of me was more cautious. If you can get shot once, you can get shot twice. This is not a very good idea.’

Bradby decided that while he loved being a foreign reporter he didn’t love it quite enough and began the process of disengaging himself from the job. But offers back home were thin on the ground and against his better judgement, Bradby accepted the position of ITV royal correspondent ‘…which was the last thing on the planet I wanted to be,’ he says. ‘But it also happened to be the only job going at the time.’

Somehow, despite the fact that he had ‘absolutely no interest in the Royal Family until that moment… hadn’t had any thoughts or opinions on them and hadn’t even given ten seconds of my time to any royal story’, he began to enjoy himself. ‘The truth is, I ended up finding it all completely fascinating. Why? Because it is all so very weird.’

He’d also lucked out with his timing. For the two years Tom did the job, an awful lot of juicy royal stuff was going on. ‘You had the collapse of the Paul Burrell trial, the Queen Mother dying, Princess Margaret dying…’ And then (after he’d actually given up the job for his current role), the big one.

‘By fluke, happenstance, circumstance, whatever…’ Bradby was chosen to do the official, globally networked interview with the recently engaged Prince William and Kate Middleton. ‘They were looking for someone in the media with whom they could have some sort of relationship,’ he explains. Bradby’s easy-going combination of boyish charm, his honorable man-to-man agreement with William that he would be discreet and respectful of the couple’s privacy, and the fact that his wife Claudia, now a jewellery designer, knew Kate a bit, having worked with the future Duchess of Cambridge at the high street store Jigsaw, got him the gig. ‘I ended up rather liking them.’

His hardboiled war corres-pondent pals who were still dodging shells in Basra may not have been impressed, but Bradby played the extraordinary interest in the young Royals to his advantage, becoming an in-demand pundit all over the world (he was one of a handful of journalists invited to the royal wedding) and now anchors his own political talk show, The Agenda, on ITV.

At times he seems like a character straight out of The Thick of It (which, of course, Tom adores but reckons the swearing is ‘even worse’ in real-life politics), calling Miliband and Cameron ‘Ed and Dave’, and telling me how he gets on well with Neil Kinnock of all people. ‘Many journalists don’t, but Neil and I go out to lunch and talk about rugby players from the 1970s over a bottle of wine.’ He doesn’t seem to be particularly chummy with Gordon Brown or John Bercow. So, which party does Bradby favour himself? ‘I’m apolitical,’ he says quickly. ‘I’m a classic floating voter. People find this idea very challenging for some reason but the idea that you would vote for one party all your life seems ridiculous to me. I have views, of course I do, but if I ever found myself being consistent on anything for more than about ten minutes I’d probably start an argument with myself just to confound it.’

He’s such a thoroughly nice chap is Tom Bradby that it is hard to believe that he was responsible for the script of such an unremittingly bleak film as Shadow Dancer, adapted from his own 1998 novel (he has written six books altogether). Starring Andrea Riseborough and a craggy, cheaply suited Clive Owen, it is a gripping story of Faustian betrayal and twisted loyalties unfolding among the beige velour and knotty pine of sink-estate flats. The slow-burn thriller plays out in unlovely pubs patronised by hard-drinking, badly dressed men and breast-feeding mums, and the grim, chain-smoking bureaux of the intelligence services; directed by Oscar winner James Marsh, who also made Man On Wire, Project Nim and the TV series Red Riding — 1980, Shadow Dancer is an oddly beautiful, haunting piece.

Inspired by a woman he met in Northern Ireland who’d turned IRA informer (‘If a mistake was made in that sort of Faustian, conflict scenario, death was always the result’), Bradby wanted Shadow Dancer to convey a similar tension and miserabilist aesthetic that he’d seen in films such as The Lives of Others and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. There is a love story hidden in the plot somewhere: ‘but I’ve had to tell my friends not to go in expecting a romcom,’ he says.

Now, with the film’s premiere looming, Tom Bradby is having to make the kind of daffy, image-centric Hollywood decisions that would doubtless make his old war correspondent chums hoot in derision. ‘I couldn’t believe it when they asked me if I’d need grooming for this photo shoot,’ he says. ‘We never do hair or make-up at ITN.’ Will he have a stylist for the red carpet? He says not: ‘but while we’ve been filming The Agenda it was decided that my shirt-and-tie combinations were such a disgrace a member of the production team should be put in charge of choosing what I wore, so…’

Bradby shakes his head and grimaces with embarrassment as he chooses another fondant and sips his Earl Grey tea. Behind us, Statham is quietly growling. ES

Shadow Dancer is out on 24 August

ON THE TOWN

Favourite London pub?

The Scarsdale Tavern in Kensington.

What are you reading?

Claire Tomalin’s brilliant biography of Pepys for

a project on the Great Fire of London.

Favourite London restaurant?

Franco’s in Jermyn Street.

Best place for eavesdropping?

The Cinnamon Club, if you are after political gossip. It’s a bit like the Westminster canteen!

Best blockbuster this year?

I’m looking forward to both Bourne and Bond.

Lights, camera, action man

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