PA - Professor Robert Winston

Doctor in pursuit of the divine; Wil Marlow finds the BBC's favourite man of science is also a man of God.

The health service's loss is television's gain, for earlier this year Professor Robert Winston retired from the NHS and his position as Director of NHS Research and Development for Hammersmith Hospital.

It had been a long and illustrious career in which the doctor, who is now, of course, well-known as a presenter, had made leaps and bounds in the often difficult and emotional science of fertility, helping thousands of childless couples to achieve their dream of starting a family. With such an achievement under the 65-year-old's belt, it's no wonder the good doctor is missing his lifelong vocation.

"I spent 40 years treating patients," he says, "and it's a hard thing to leave something which is so rewarding and, I hope, has been helpful and useful. It's a very nice feeling to be useful."

Robert is, of course, still making himself very useful. He continues his academic work as Professor of Fertility Studies at Imperial College, London University, and this is flexible enough to allow him to work on even bigger projects on television.

Best known for his enthusiastic and engrossing documentaries looking at human life and its history, he's become a household name and won three Baftas for series such as The Human Body, Superhuman, Walking With Cavemen and The Human Mind.

But now, for the first time, Robert is stepping out of his field of expertise for his most demanding television project yet - The Story Of God, looking at how our belief in a higher power has developed over the centuries.

Something he is keen to point out, however, is that this is not a religious programme. He looks at the story of God from a scientific and historical point of view - how people's beliefs in a all- powerful deity developed, how that belief has impacted on human development over the centuries, and how it impacts on our lives today.

"One of the reasons for me agreeing to make this series," he says, "was I wanted to show an aspect of humanity that is not, I think, very well dealt with by many scientists, who often profess strongly atheist beliefs and are rather dismissive of the spiritual side of humanity. I wanted to, as a scientist, redress that a bit really.

"It's my view, expressed in that programme, that actually there shouldn't be a conflict between science and religion, that actually they should be able to sit quite comfortably side by side. They're both looking at the natural world in different ways, but which aren't necessarily conflicting."

Robert himself is that rare individual - a man of science who practices religion, in his case Judaism. He says he's never had any trouble reconciling the two disciplines.

"I certainly follow a somewhat religious track in my life," he says. "I think religion provides a very useful framework for people and it's been quite helpful to me. Has there been a conflict between my science and religious practice? No, I don't think there has.

"On the contrary I think it's enlightened and helped my clinical practice. I think it's been very useful in making good decisions about an area of biology that is fairly controversial - mainly the embryo, human life and its start, pregnancy and conception.

"Many of the decisions I come to in helping people have been illuminated by, not necessarily my religious views, but other peoples', and religious views in general."

The professor and the BBC film crew travelled the world in their mission to tell God's story, visiting places as far flung as America, France, Switzerland, Italy, Mexico, Sri Lanka, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Israel and Egypt.

"It was arduous," says Robert. "Because it was not travelling comfortably and much of it was in quite hostile environments.

"Just getting a visa, for example, to go to India, which was what we wanted to do to film Hinduism, was extraordinarily difficult. It was so difficult that eventually we decided to go to Sri Lanka instead because it would be easier.

"In Saudi, of course, no non-Muslim can go to Mecca, which is incomprehensible really but it's there and one has to accept it.

"And in Iran it's not a very easy society to move around freely, where there are religious sensibilities and where the Shi'ite Muslims are somewhat suspicious of people who come with a Christian or Jewish or other view.

"I don't think this series would have been possible for me to do at all a few years ago when I was heavily involved in clinical practice. I regret having to leave that part of my life but life moves on and this is quite a fulfilling way of spending my life intellectually."

Robert says he will continue straying away from his usual area of expertise in future television projects -he says there's another possible philosophical series in the pipeline. But he promises to return to biology as well, he's committed to doing another series on reproduction. There's also one hugely ambitious project he'd like to take on.

"I still think that one of the great icons of television was Bronowski's 1973 series The Ascent Of Man," says Robert. "And I think it would be very interesting to revisit some of those themes from a more modern perspective.

"Whether the BBC would do that I don't know because television has changed so much and I don't want to presume they'd want me to do it anyway. "I'm always surprised they ask me to do anything, really."

total:spec: Desperate Housewives

When both Friends and Sex And The City finished in 2004, it seemed Channel 4 would never be able to replace them. The two American shows had captured the imaginations of a whole generation who discussed the ins and outs of each episode at work water coolers the next day. Both shows seemed impossible acts to follow and yet American television managed it. Within months of Friends and Sex And The City finishing two new shows were the talk of the airwaves - survival thriller Lost and, on an even bigger ratings scale, Desperate Housewives. Both have, of course, been picked up by Channel 4 and repeated their US success here in the UK. When the first episode of Desperate Housewives was screened here at the beginning of 2005, it garnered the channel the highest ever audience share for a US series launch, including ER, Sex And The City and Friends. So confident were Channel 4 of its success that they bought the rights to the second series, which is due on screens here in January, before that first episode was even screened.
Desperate Housewives has become a TV phenomenon to rival that of Friends. For a year it's been untouchable, the shining star of the TV schedules that everyone loves. Despite constant negative press about the rumoured rivalries between the show's five female stars - Marcia Cross, Teri Hatcher, Felicity Huffman, Eva Longoria and Nicollette Sheridan - the show itself has only received positive coverage. Critics love it as much as the millions of viewers that watch it, and it has been showered with awards, including six Emmys and one Golden Globe. But as the show powers on through its second series in America, the first rumblings of a backlash have begun.
Critics in the US have been quite scathing in their comments of the new series, saying that it's lost its campy sensibility, its eye on realism and the originality that marked it out from other TV dramas. A new storyline involving actress Alfre Woodard - who joins the cast in series two as Betty Applewhite, a new neighbour who imprisons someone in her basement - also came under some negative scrutiny. One critic said that it "has not only wasted Woodard's talent, but our time as well". The most common accusation is that the show is resting on its laurels. This was being said even as far back as when the last episode of the first series was being screened in the UK. Russell T Davies, the writer who this year resurrected Doctor Who, a self-confessed fan of Desperate Housewives, said in one interview he felt the season finale "was good but it didn’t really build to a good climax. It was quite secure in the knowledge it was coming back next year so it relaxed at the end, I thought. I think that’s a mistake as you want to leave people punching the air."
The lack of punch that American critics say beleaguers the new series of Desperate Housewives has been put down to the apparently diminishing involvement of the show's creator and executive producer Marc Cherry. Cherry didn’t write any of the new series’ first three episodes and Touchstone Television, who make the series, recently announced that Cherry had signed on as co-producer of another series, a murder mystery show called Kill/Switch. There have even been rumours that Cherry is working on a spin-off series called Desperate Husbands, but Cherry himself says this is untrue and that the speculation about his involvement has been blown completely out of proportion. He says he is still a major contributor to the show’s scripts and plans to be with the show for the next three series.
“I am as involved in the writing process as I’ve always been,” says Cherry. “I help come up with the storylines, I give notes and, indeed, I write things constantly. I take the credit and the blame for everything that goes on screen.
“Yes we’re trying new stuff. Some of it might work, some of it might not. This, of course, is the nature of episodic television. They can’t all be gems. Rest assured I’m paying attention to my audience’s response and am trying my darndest to please them. And I will do so as long as I’ve got that executive producer credit above my name.”
Cherry’s been through worse periods in his career than this. Starting in TV as a writer on The Golden Girls in 1990, Cherry, who’s 43, went on to write a number of sitcoms throughout the 90s, all of which flopped. The end of the decade saw him virtually unemployable. Not only did have a bad track record, reality TV had become the viewer’s genre of choice over comedy and drama. But he didn’t give up. He began work on Desperate Housewives, a project he toiled over for two and a half years only to have it turned down by every channel he approached. And then more bad luck. His agent Marcie Wright was jailed for embezzlement, which included thousands of dollars of Cherry’s. He borrowed money from his mother, got new representation, and things began to change. His new agents Paradigm pitched Housewives again, this time as a soap with comedy elements rather than a satire. It worked. ABC, a channel who weren’t exactly doing well themselves and were losing viewers at a rate of knots, went for it and found themselves with the biggest TV hit of the year.
“ABC helped me and I helped ABC,” says Cherry. “We were both very desperate entities, to be sure.”
Cherry got the idea for Housewives from his own family background. Brought up one of three children of successful oil executive Truman Cherry and his wife Martha, Cherry had a good childhood despite the obvious problems between his parents.
“At some point they became two people who really had in common only their children,” says Cherry. “That was the bad part of their marriage. The good part was that so much love was poured into us kids.”
Martha is the obvious inspiration for Lynette, played by Felicity Huffman. Before Cherry and his siblings came along, Martha was a fashion designer, but gave up her career to become a housewife and bring up her children. Lynette’s story comes from a moment when Cherry and his mother were watching a programme about Andrea Yates, the Texan mother who drowned her five children. Cherry’s mother suddenly blurted out that she’d experienced similar desperation.
“It hit me so hard,” says Cherry. “I thought that she was always happy.”
But Cherry’s mother is also the inspiration for Bree, played by Marcia Cross. Cherry says his mother was obsessed with creating the perfect home and life for her family. A similar incident to that in the penultimate episode of the first series, where Bree makes the bed as her husband suffers a heart attack on the stairs, saying to him, ‘I never leave the house with an unmade bed, you know that,’ before taking him to hospital, actually occurred between Cherry’s parents in real life.
“But thank God for my family’s weirdness,” says Cherry. “Now I drive a Lexus because of it.”
The success of Desperate Housewives has been staggering. It’s become a pop culture phenomenon around the world, made huge stars of its five main protagonists and in doing so single-handedly resurrected the career of Teri Hatcher, who plays Susan. It garnered an average of 25 million viewers a week during the first series in the US, becoming the most successful show there since ER. Even Laura Bush referenced it in a speech she gave at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
Stephen McPherson, president of ABC Entertainment, is quite straightforward about the show’s success.
“It’s an incredibly entertaining show,” he says. “It has great comedy, great drama, great mystery and great intrigue.”
Others have looked for deeper meaning to the show’s success. Naomi Wolf, described as America’s leading feminist, is one.
“First, it says the unsayable without apologies – about female unconscious and, by doing so, makes Sex And The City, its obvious antecedent, seem quaint, even demure. Second, it lets hard-working women explore a retreat fantasy – of a work-free life in suburbia – and then emerge from it refreshed and with an appetite for their own tough, bracing, more independent lives.”
Susan Douglas, professor of communication studies at the University of Michigan has a slightly different take on the show’s ability to engage so many viewers.
“It rips the veneer off the myth of suburban domestic bliss,” she says. “In the process, the show punctures the notion that in a post-feminist world women have achieved full equality and can choose freely how they want to live their lives. The choices women make are anything but choices. Women watching can easily relate to that.”
Media analyst Stacey Lynn Koerner echoes that.
“It’s not about the angst of young life, it’s about the angst of real life. It’s figuring out where you are in terms of the choices you’ve already made. It’s [American 80s drama] Thirtysomething, but more domestic.”
The cast, however, refuse to get bogged down in all the theory.
“I don’t care about any of that,” says Hatcher. “For me it’s just pure entertainment.”
“It’s very entertaining and it moves fast,” agrees Steven Culp, who played the now deceased Rex Van De Kamp. “Beyond that there are things about the characters that people recognise, and that resonate in their own lives.”
So everyone loves it, that’s obvious. But how long will that last? Aside from the criticism thrown at the new series in America, the show has had to deal with trouble on the inside as well. Much has been made of the reported in-fighting between the five main cast members – there's been alleged jealousy of those who did pick up awards for Desperate Housewives and those who didn’t, for example. It was given further credence by a scathingly funny article in Vanity Fair telling the story of the difficult photo shoot for the accompanying cover picture. It seemed the success of the show had turned these five actresses into huge divas.
“The reporter caught them on a bad day after a really, really bad week,” explains Cherry. He says there was tension over the subject of Hatcher supposedly being thought of as the show’s lead. “The culmination occurred, sadly, in front of a Vanity Fair reporter, who played everything up to the hilt and made everything a little more dramatic than it was. Not that there wasn’t some truth there, there was. It happened and we got over it, and then about six weeks later the magazine comes out and we had to relive it. It really hurts my feelings because all the girls, Teri included, really do treat each other not only professionally but with love. Four or five bad days does no reflect what went on the other 240 shooting days where everything was hunky-dory.”
“I have to take my hat off to the Vanity Fair writer,” adds Huffman, “because he made this great thing out of a tempest in a teapot. Actually, we do all get along. People have been waiting for us not to get along from the minute this went on air. I remember doing press conferences with people saying, ‘That’s a lot of women on the set, there must be a lot of fighting.’ They’d been waiting for the fur to fly and now suddenly they found they had made something up to sink their teeth into.”
And so, in accordance with Huffman’s theory, the stories of on-set tension continue as the second series continues in the US. Rumours that former Baywatch star Kelly Monaco is set to join the cast has prompted stories that the five main stars are worried about their future due to the introduction of a younger female cast member. There may be some element of truth to these stories – similar reports dogged the Sex And The City cast members for years and it was eventually revealed that not all of them were untrue. But like Sex And The City, Desperate Housewives has the staying power to survive them. For despite all the criticism currently being levelled at the show in the US, the viewing figures tell a different story. The first three episodes were watched by an average of 27 million people in the US, beating the 24 million average for the whole of last series.
Cherry has no reason to worry about his baby, but he is. It’s nothing to do with all the criticism, however. Instead of worrying about the quality of the show, he’s worrying it may get a little too controversial this series. He’s preparing himself for a backlash concerning a storyline where Andrew Van De Kamp exacts a horrible revenge on his overbearing mother.
“It will be about as bad as anything on TV,” says Cherry. “Andrew resents her tremendously. He’s going to get back at her. We’ve got something just hideous planned. I’m going to get letters.”

PA - Chris Rea

I will always be a Boro lad

By Wil Marlow

Chris Rea is no stranger to hospitals. Pottering about his home-cum-studio, he tells of his latest visit, which was for a not very pleasant sounding operation to remove a blockage in one of his sinuses. Despite repeated visits, thanks to a string of health problems, he says he never gets used to going to hospital.

"It's always hard to go back. Just because of all the scenarios that have happened to me. In 1994 I had a big colon operation, and in 2001 I lost my pancreas, duodenum, and gall bladder."

That followed a cancer scare, and it goes on. "You're very much aware of post-operative infection, especially in hospitals now because of the MRSA stuff," explains the Middlesbrough-born musician.

"I'm always on at the doctor, driving him mad. I'll say to him 'I feel something.' He'll say 'Yes, it's called pain.' I'll say 'I've got an abscess,' and he'll say 'No, it's not an abscess,' and I'll say 'Prove to me it's not an abscess.'

"I do give the doctors a hard time. It's my paranoia, but I have a right to be paranoid."

He certainly has. The 54-year-old, who has sold 30 million albums worldwide, has just been back in hospital again. He developed an abscess on his leg following an infection from the insulin injections that he has to administer daily. He became diabetic after nearly dying following the major surgery of 2001.

Chris, who famously wrote The Road To Hell, is now on the road to recovery again but still leads a difficult life.

"It's tough," he says. "I train very hard to keep everything going as much as possible. I do a lot of weight training to keep my muscles the right size.

"I don't want big guy muscles but because the pancreas converts so many things into the whole life blood of your body. When you don't have one, lots of things go missing.

"In order to maintain muscle ratio, I have to do 50 press-ups to your 10, otherwise I'd start wasting away.

"I'm type one diabetic and certain foods can give me the effects of food poisoning very easily. What else? Oh yeah, my circulation's not good. So I train about five times a week. I hate it."

He makes it interesting by playing football games on his own. "I can play ball against a wall and invent a rule that means I have to keep running to keep it up. I can play for an hour."

Chris's health problems do not stop him working, however, much to his family's concern. His wife Joan and daughters, Josephine, 21, and 16-year-old Julia, were not overjoyed when he began work on a mammoth 11 album project which took him a year to complete.

Blue Guitars sees Chris and his regular band of musicians traverse the story of the blues from its origins in west Africa through to modern blues.

It's all original material written by Chris and his cohorts, but he did sample heavily as well as make use of old and modified instruments and electrical equipment.

"This was my first ever guitar," he says, picking up a battered looking instrument, "£28 it was. We used it on all of Blue Guitars.

"We found all these old instruments in silly little shops as well, and we got ourselves some great little amps from the 50s on eBay. One of them was a real pain actually but we managed OK."

Blue Guitars is an epic project but Chris is keen to point out it is no history lesson. He is looking at the blues timeline, and how it has changed over the years, then he is mixing it up to show the connections - like taking a jigsaw and putting it together in a different way while still getting the same picture. He famously does not like listening to his own music but it is obvious he is immensely proud of this.

"It's the first one I've ever taken home. It's different to all the others because there's been nothing in the way of what I wanted to do.

"I'm actually hearing my musical idea whereas, when I used to have executive producers, everything got watered down, shortened, strings added for the wrong reason. There's no compromise on Blue Guitars."

Chris, whose early ambition was to be a journalist, went to St Mary's College in Middlesbrough and was a latecomer to music. He did not pick up a guitar until he was 19 and joined his first group only at 22.

He is the son of Camillo Rea, the Italian immigrant whose family ran Middlesbrough's biggest ice-cream business and he even worked in the old family ice-cream factory at Brambles Farm.
As his career developed, he lived in a flat above Rea's famous Park Bar opposite Albert Park which was beloved of footballers and football fans on their way to Ayresome Park.

His first big success came with the album Whatever Happened To Benny Santini and the magnificently haunting single Fool (If You Think It's Over).

He married Joan, the former Stainsby Girl he immortalised in his song about the pupils of the old Acklam secondary school, and the successes kept rolling out including Driving Home For Christmas which will soon be ringing out from everywhere.

He moved away in 1983 and the family now lives at Cookham just outside Windsor.
Despite the 22 year gap, he still has that distinctive smoke and gravel Teesside accent.

"A lot of people are amazed I haven't lost my accent," he says, "but I don't mind. I'll always be a Boro lad."

A versatile one, too. Blue Guitars is not just a musical project as, for each album, he used his painting skills for the cover, creating a visual representation of each style of blues he experimented with. The paintings are to be shown at an exhibition in London.

"When somebody was doing the engineering technical stuff, or someone was learning a part, I'd be in the kitchen doing the paintings.

"I was working on this project all day every day for a year. The family weren't happy about it. After the illness I'd said I wasn't going to do much, that I wasn't going to chase the company line anymore. I ended up chasing my own line," he laughs.

"I'm on a promise now that I won't do this type of thing again in terms of how I did it. But to me it's not work. My bad moments are when I don't have anything musical to do.

"It's because I genuinely love doing it."

Blue Guitars will be his last release under the name Chris Rea. His tour next year with most dates - including Newcastle City Hall - sold out, will also be a last. Afterwards he will be part of a three-piece called The Fire Flies.

"I don't want to be hindered by my health," he says. "I love touring, it's the best job in the world - if I had a different body.

"My health is hard to forecast and I can't guarantee things aren't going to get any worse. I need to find a different way of working."

total:spec - Ms Dynamite

"If I was Prime Minister," says Ms Dynamite, "the first thing I would do is take a trip around the country and talk to young people about how they feel, what they want, what they need, what they like, what they dislike. I would just find out ways in which I could help them to be everything they can be, to feel that they count and their opinion counts and to let them know that they are important and that they are the future. They’re everything, basically. That would be my first thing, to focus on young people and what they want and not what I think they want or need. That's a big problem at the moment, young people don’t get enough attention.”

Ms Dynamite, real name Niomi McLean-Daley, might not be Prime Minister, at least not yet, but she is a very powerful young woman. The London-born R&B singer is a refreshing voice in a period when most pop stars monitor what they say carefully and are so media trained they have made sitting on the fence a fine art. But Niomi is happy to wax lyrical on subjects that very few of today’s pop stars would dare to talk about. And people listen to Niomi. Whether she's talking, or singing, about gun crime, or domestic violence, or racism, what she says is guaranteed to go in print and without all the snidey remarks that accompany the worthy ramblings of the likes of Bono or Chris Martin.

"You think I get more respect? Really?” Niomi laughs. "That’s very funny. No one's said that to me before. I feel like they do take the piss. That people go, 'Oh here she goes again, like, shut up.’ But I just don't care. Honestly I have no idea if what you say is the case, why there might be a difference between me and another artist. I guess all I can say is that I hope people do take me and my music, and my feelings and stuff, at least half seriously. Just because it comes from the heart, it really does. I put it out there in the hope that it is helpful to someone. If nothing else I hope people can maybe have a bit of respect for that. And if they don’t, who cares? No, I do. I hope that can be appreciated because otherwise what’s the point? If it doesn't do what it I want it to do then I might as well not do it. Do you get what I mean?"

You don’t say things without thinking it will make a difference.

“Yeah," she says. "With some specific songs I sometimes think, actually should I put this out there? Things that are personal and things that I know someone’s going to come back and say, 'What did you mean when you said this?', whatever it may be. I hope the thing that will override my decision is that this might help someone out there. I hope that it does otherwise it’s just pointless.”

Niomi, who is just 24, is very aware of her power. Although it's just in her nature to state her opinions on social and political subjects with passion and whenever the mood takes her, she does it knowing that she can make some sort of difference. Of the many awards she won around the release of her 2002 debut album A Little Deeper, one of them was the non-music related Telegraph Woman Of The Year award, which she was given for her stance on gun crime. Despite all this, she doesn't set out with an agenda.

"It sounds like I have this checklist of things I want to talk about," she says when asked if she'll be talking about gun crime again. "It’s really not like that. I talk about what I feel. I talk about whatever is in my heart at that time and whatever I’m going through or seeing or whatever. It’s just what’s natural to me. So who knows? I wouldn’t like to say, ‘I’m going to raise this issue and that issue’. We’ll just see how things go I guess.

"It’s never my intention to do it in my music either," she adds. "Every now and again I’ll come across something and I’ll write about it and I’ll look back and think, oops. It’s always a case of, are you sure you want to say that? And instantly this thing kicks in that says, [aggressively] yes I do. It doesn't give me a chance to second question it. And that part of me is the part that says, yes I do want to say this because it needs to be said. I want people to think about it. I want people to, I don’t know, be a bit more aware I guess. So yeah, I don’t go out with that in mind, but when it comes up I will override any sort of, should I say that or shouldn’t I? I go with my first instinct.”

Gun crime is one of many issues Ms Dynamite tackled on her recent album Judgement Days, on the track Put Your Gun Away. The song included the lyrics: 'Put your gun away, ease your stress and just chill. Put your gun up in your waist and everything will be just fine.' But nowhere did Niomi stake her claim as the queen of issue-driven pop than on her comeback double A-side single Judgement Day/Father. While Father tackled the thorny issue of Niomi's dad leaving his family when she was just two, Judgement Day went all out. It was anti-war, anti-big companies, anti-pervert priests, anti-wife-beating husbands - all in a three minute pop song. Niomi obviously seems happy to bear the weight of the world on her shoulders, but sometimes it must get too much?

"I can’t say I get depressed," says Niomi. "But honestly I have had to teach myself how to switch off, because I do carry everything around with me. I have to switch off more than anything now for my son. My brother is such a person who’s into everything, he loves to know facts, figures and information about everything that’s going on across the board. He’s like a walking encyclopaedia,” she laughs.

“But he’ll come in and say, ‘Guess what happened’, and I’ll be like, ‘I don’t want to know, don’t tell me’, because it will affect me. And he gets so annoyed with me. He just wants to chat and I have to say I don’t want to. But that’s how I stop it getting depressing. A lot of stuff there's nothing I can do about it, and I get this feeling of feeling someone else’s pain but feeling helpless. They’re going through it and there’s nothing I can do to help them out of it. That is the bit that I can’t get my head round. It’s really frustrating but if I let it affect me too much it doesn't just affect me, it affects my son. I have to find ways of dealing with it. I don’t want to sound like some morbid person, but I do get sad.”

What gives you hope?

“Children," says Niomi immediately. "Young people. I would say my son but that is just so obvious,” she grins. “Just kids in general. They totally give me all the hope in the world. They’re just what it’s about really. They are the point.”

Niomi became a parent herself two years ago, to her son Shavaar, which prompted a lengthy career break. It seemed like bad timing - she was on a roll after the success of her debut album A Little Deeper. As well as selling half a million copies. the album garnered Niomi a slew of awards. A Mercury Music Prize, three MOBOs and two Brits, as well as that Telegraph Woman Of The Year award now weigh down her mantelpiece. Niomi was one of Britain's brightest new talents and it seemed like a bad move to take a break with only one album under her belt.

"I thought the timing was perfect," counters Niomi. "On a personal level it gave me time out, which is bad, really, because I should have just had a break,” she laughs. “But it gave me time out to reflect on myself, what was going on. Just my son being there has given me something that nothing else on earth could give me - a sense of strength that I can’t really explain. Then that has filtered out into everything else, so now I’ve come back and I feel a million times stronger, a million times more confident. I know what I want to do and how I want to do it. Just all round I feel that the timing for me, and for Ms Dynamite, couldn’t have been better. I don’t know if the people around me would agree, but I felt like it was perfect.”

Were there any worries from any quarters that you taking time out would ruin the momentum of the success of the last album?

“Not really," Niomi replies. "At least, no one ever said it to me. But I’m sure for anyone with any care for the project and Ms Dynamite and the success of things from a business perspective, that must have crossed their minds. But no one came out and said that at the time.”

That's very nice of them.

“Well I just think, what could be done anyway? It doesn’t matter. They could have expressed it as much as they wanted. Even I said at the time it might not be the best thing for the project, but at the end of the day I’m not just a project, I am a human being that has a life, a personal life, as well. I just felt that I had done a lot for Ms Dynamite and was ignoring Niomi and what was right for Niomi at that time. I just thought, this is what I want, this is what I’m ready for. There is a a life and a world outside of this and I shouldn’t feel pressurised or allow it to dictate something as important as my child. I was ready and that was what I was going to do.”

Inevitably going back to work was a wrench. Having spent 18 months purely focusing on bringing up her child (she split from Shavaar's father Dwayne Seaforth this year but he remains heavily involved with the upbringing of his son), Niomi found it hard being away from Shavaar for the long hours she had to spend in the studio.

“But he makes it really easy,” says Niomi. “He was just like, ‘Bye Mum, see you later’. He wasn’t bothered in the slightest, whereas if he was a bit more upset I don’t know what I would’ve done. I don’t know if I’d be sitting here right now. But he’s just like, ‘You going work now Mum? Okay bye, have a nice day.’ I just go, ‘Aw! My baby!’ He makes things so much easier.

"At the end of the day he is my motivation. When it gets hard and I get tired I just think, right there’s a bigger picture here. Really the bottom line is no matter how much I love what I do and all the other things I'm involved in, and why I do what I do, no matter how much I want to help others, if it ever effects him in a negative way, that’s the end of it. He is the No 1 sole priority in my life."

Motherhood has certainly softened the edges of Ms Dynamite, and with the release of her reggae-tinged new single Fall In Love Again you may be forgiven for thinking that the singer is slowly becoming more like the female singers she has long stood out from. But this is not the case. The tattoo across her right wrist, which says, 'Without Struggle There Is No Progress', keeps her mind on the issues that mean so much to her. But despite being one of the most politicised singers to come out of Britain in recent years, she says the actual world of politics wouldn't suit her.

"It’s not something I want to do," she says. "I want to be a part of making things better and, yeah, if I have to go into politics to do that then I’m willing to. But it’s not something that appeals to me. I mean, what does appeal about politics? Let’s be serious here."

Well, like you said, you could make things better.

“If I thought I could make more of a difference by becoming a politician then I would do it. But I feel that I am able to make more of a difference in the way that I want to, saying the things that I want to say and how I want to say them, through music. By doing what I'm doing now. I’m allowed to be creative and say what I want to say and do my thing. There’s not really any limitations, but in politics there are. People are silenced and they’re not always allowed to say what they want. Sometimes if they do they’re punished for it. That is not the place for me because I wouldn't last very long,” she laughs. "They’d be just like, get her out of here! I’m happy with what I’m doing now. I feel like it is making a difference. Not necessarily in the way or to the extent I want, but give me time.” She smiles. “I’m working on it.”

total:spec - Legless

In November of this year the government will be passing new laws that will change the landscape of British drinking culture. The Licensing Act 2003 will become fully operational and pubs, bars and nightclubs will be able to provide alcohol for their customers for many more hours than is currently the case.

As the change in the law has drawn closer the debate surrounding the effects it will have on the drinking culture of Britain has become more and more frenzied. A new Channel 4 drama confronts the issues raised by this debate head on.

Legless, written and directed by Matt Greenhalgh, best known for his work on Cold Feet and cult BBC drama Burn It, is a one-off film that follows the experiences of a group of disparate people during a night out in an unnamed ‘town near you’.

“It was inspired by fact we didn’t think the current system works,” says producer Nicola Shindler. “Matt is young and still goes out and is conscious that the things that are written about this debate are written by people who don’t know what they’re talking about. We set it on streets that are in so many towns in the country. What you get in a lot of newspapers is condemnation of those streets - ‘Isn’t it awful? Look at all those people falling over.’ -  when actually people choose to go out there and have a great time. We’re trying to say, if it’s so horrible why do people go out every week?”

By telling a handful of stories through various fictional characters and their experiences of the current state of drinking culture in Britain, Greenhalgh has tried to give a balanced view (albeit an ultimately pro-reform one) of what is both right and wrong with the current system of shutting bars and pubs at 11 o’clock and clubs at two o’clock. At the heart of the film is the conflict between a pro-reform councillor who believes the only way to salvage his town is to extend drinking hours, and a chief constable who believes the situation is difficult enough already.

“The chief of police is old school and puts his foot down,” explains Greenhalgh. “And we’ve got the councillor who at the outset you think is the bad guy, saying that if they don’t change they won’t change. He says that if the chief of police isn’t happy now, what does he expect it to be like in five or 10 years? That’s the real crux of Legless, how those two characters, who are totally different in their lives, end up on a night out together to try and persuade the other one that their point of view is right. It’s interesting because even those two characters come out at the end of the night with the feeling that neither of them are right. It’s an open-ended argument for these characters who, at the start, were really specific in how they viewed the change in drinking laws.”

Also featured are two under-age lads having the time of their lives, a licensing lawyer who makes money out of the system, a paramedic who is sick and tired of his job but returning to it after being assaulted by a drunken patient, and a woman in her late 20s who needs a bit of Dutch courage to talk to a man she’s attracted to.

“Hopefully there’s someone everyone can relate to,” says Greenhalgh. “That’s what I wanted. I hope it’s come out like films like Short Cuts and Magnolia, things where you’re taken on multiple journeys in one story. I think that was a good decision because you have to show all sides of this drinking argument.”

The young woman who turns to a glass of wine for Dutch courage is played by Nicola Stephenson, the actress best known for her roles in Brookside, Holby City and Clocking Off. Her character Terri is having a bad time of it, suffering from low self-esteem. Fed up of the routine of going out with her mates and getting drunk, she decides to give it up. But when she’s chatted up by a man in a bar, she realises the only thing that can give her the courage to return his interest is a glass of wine.

“She has a little drink and gets a bit merry and then they have a really sweet little love story,” says Stephenson. “My character shows the positive effects of alcohol.”

Stephenson herself is no stranger to a drink or two. In her Holby City days the actress was often photographed out on the town with her co-stars Lisa Faulkner and Angela Griffin.

“I don’t think we drunk in a problem way,” says Stephenson. “We used to go out but there were never any pictures of us falling out of clubs and falling into cabs hammered or anything. We used to dance more than anything. But everybody’s done binge-drinking. Everyone my age has, definitely. Everyone’s woken up on a Sunday morning feeling like they want to die, haven’t they?

“But now it’s a really big issue, it’s everywhere. You can’t escape it. Everyone’s thinking about how much they drink and how much the recommended amount is and how many units are in a pint of beer. It seems to be a bit of a buzz topic at the moment. I think that’s why Matt wrote it, because alcohol’s got such a bad name right now, everyone’s so worried about it. You don’t hear in the press about the positive sides. What we do have to promote is responsible drinking really because there’s no point just saying, it’s bad, stop doing it, because I think if people abstain and then binge that makes the problem worse. I think it’s more responsible to show that used maturely it can be enhancing in certain social situations.”

Ostensibly what is happening with the debate surrounding the new drinking laws is a moral panic. Earlier in the year newspapers were putting the frighteners up the public about kids in hoodies. An innocent piece of clothing became an item that struck fear into the more faint-hearted newspaper reader. The same is happening with British drinking culture. The onset of 24-hour drinking in this country has inspired some journalists to create a vision of drunken violence and street crime that has spiralled out of control.

“It’s something Matt calls The Fear,” says Shindler. “People like being scared and this is a big fear that the newspapers play on in people.”

But those who are pro-reform say that the current level of drunken violence and street crime is only occurring because drinkers are all ejected onto the streets at the same time each Friday and Saturday night. They feel if it was staggered, if people could leave when they like, the chaotic behaviour of drinkers would actually decrease.

“I think we set ourselves up for a fall actually,” says Greenhalgh. “The system doesn’t work at the moment because I don’t think there’s any chance to drink maturely. If we can make sure that there’s an opportunity to drink in a  relaxed manner, maybe the next generation of kids won’t be so mad and uptight and drink over a full night what they drink in four or five hours at the moment.

“But even now it’s not that mad. It’s only a minority that cause problems. When we filmed in Wigan, it was a great environment, it really was. Of course there were police dotted down the street but that’s normally all you need to stop the arseholes kicking off. It’s visible but it’s not intrusive. And Wigan was great, it was a real holiday atmosphere. We were there for three weekends and filmed from three until three, and the crew loved it. No one was given any grief. I think in general people do just want to go out and have a drink and a good time. They don’t want to go out and smash someone’s head in. Not everyone anyway. And it’s unfortunate that that point of view constantly comes across.”

“My opinion even before I did this was that we have to do something,” adds Stephenson. “At the moment it doesn’t work, and I think our lives have become more 24 hours anyway. People are getting scared of 24 hour drinking and being a bit reactionary to it, but it’s not actually going to be people drinking 24 hours a day. It will just be that places can stay open until what time they want and therefore chucking out time will be staggered. It won’t be everyone leaving at the same time and getting into fights for taxis, and all these people in one concentrated area of the town, all drunk and leading to trouble. It will get rid of so much trouble on the streets.”

Although Legless is being shown as the centre-piece to a series of factual programming on Channel 4 that will debate the law change, all those involved are keen to point out that the main aim of Legless is to entertain rather than educate. “It’s very funny and very fast and very loud and it’s very not like a political debate,” says Shindler. That said, it’s subject matter perfectly places it in the centre of the debate and it will certainly get people talking about it in contexts other than a television drama.

“What reaction Legless gets depends on what viewing goggles they put on when they watch it,” says Greenhalgh. “It opens with a fight because we had to set the scene up that things aren’t in a very good state and then gradually roll out the argument that it’s not as bad as everyone thinks. I hope people stick with it and realise there’s an intelligent idea behind it, rather than just saying it’s an argument for or against changing the law.”

“When I read the script I just thought it was a really good drama,” says Stephenson. “I think we’ve done it in a way that’s not worthy, it’s just realistic. It paints a realistic portrayal of alcohol and the licensing system as it is now. And that’s all in a good drama. It certainly doesn’t preach. The opposite in fact. It shows that alcohol is good as well as bad. Aside from the political questions it raises, it’s just really brilliant with well-rounded characters. I love the way their stories are all inter-weaved into this one night out in a town near you. I hope people enjoy it as a drama, as well as talk about what it raises.”