to walk away from the iran nuclear agreement. writing in the new york times, borisjohnson said historic evidence of an iranian secret project to develop nuclear weapons underscored the importance of the deal. pakistan's interior minister has narrowly escaped an assassination attempt. a gunman fired at ahsan iqbal as he left a rally in punjab province. he was hit in the right shoulder. his son told local media that his condition isn't life—threatening. the former manchester united manager, sir alex ferguson, remains in intensive care after undergoing emergency surgery for a bleed on the brain. a club statement on saturday said the operation had gone very well, but there's been no update on his condition. are now on bbc news — hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk, i'm stephen sackur.

watching tv is something pretty much all of us do for news, sport, and entertainment, but how much of what we stare at on the box do we actually remember? well, over the past 50 years my guest today produced some of the most memorable, brilliant and shocking tv drama ever made. tony garnett‘s subjects — homelessness, illegal abortion, police corruption — point to his radicalism. he uncovered dark corners of british life. how much of his motivation came from the dark corners in his own life? tony garnett, welcome to hardtalk.

sometimes it feels simplistic to make causal links between people's professional lives and their personal lives, but in your case would you say there are grounds for making a very direct connection? there are, of course there are with everyone. sometimes they are unconscious and they remain unconscious. i have onlyjust recently, finally, through hammering through the first draft of this memoir, realised what the connections were. i think it is true of everyone. you fascinate me in that sense, because you have waited until your late 70s, 80 years old, to write a memoir which has exposed very bleak and dark things about your own past, which, in a sense, cast new light upon your professional work as a television and film producer.

if we start with the personal, as a child you went through the most extraordinary trauma which most people watching this would not be able to imagine. can you tell me a little bit about it? well, very, very briefly, it was 1941 in december. the bombs were dropping in birmingham and my dad was in a reserved occupation working in a munitions factory. it was down the air raid shelter every night, up the next morning to see if the house was still there. i was loving it, it was a lot of fun for me. you were a kid, five years old. i was five, it was pretty exciting. i was in a very loving family. my mum adored me and my dad was strict but i worshipped him, my aunt and uncle were next—door and my grandma was down the road. it was a typical old fashioned close family. my mum got pregnant and my mum and dad decided for reasons, some of which have probably died

with them, that itjust wasn't the time to have another baby. in those days, it was illegal and it was against god. abortion, you mean? abortion was completely illegal. they found an abortionist, there was always a woman in the neighbourhood who would help girls. she had this abortion and something went wrong with it and she got very ill. my dad, three nights later, went to work and i was sent to bed. when he was on nights i slept with her, which i loved. i was woken up in the middle of the night and there was my mum banging on the adjoining wall to my uncle's house next door, shouting and screaming and wailing. it was a sound i had never heard before and have never heard since.

and my aunt and uncle came round, whisked me away, of course. some of this i learned later and pieced together, my mum died during the night before my dad got home. no one said anything to me. the next morning, i was at my auntie‘s house and my dad came in and he was weeping, in an uncontrolled way. i had never seen a man cry. i'd never believed my dad could cry. i was sent to my grandma's and then i was sent to an aunt. i saw my dad once more on christmas day, he came round for half an hour or so and i sat on his knee. then, the day after new year, he got a hose, put it in the gas, and laid down with a bottle of scotch, and he didn't finish it. he gassed himself to death?

yes. my aunt said, "your father's dead". no one explained anything to me, no one asked me how i felt. to be fair to them, i think they were planning when i was much older to tell me these awful things. it is 75 years on and i can tell, even the way you tell the story today, it lives with you in a very real sense now. it lives with me now but it didn't because i buried it. my theory now is that i could not experience it. it was almost an act of self preservation. but remember, for them, not only had they lost... my granddad and grandma had 12 children, and my mum was one of the favourites of them all. not only had they lost two people that they loved, but an abortion?

a suicide? attempted suicide was against the law. these are all massive taboos. and against god. just put yourself back to those times and in that class, they are respectable working—class people — the shame of it. you somehow saved yourself. to put this into context, this was the second world war. all over europe, little children were having it a lot worse than i was. they were going to concentration camps, their parents were taken away from them, the suffering and the starvation. it was difficult and i had to deal with it. but we all have difficulties, not as difficult as that perhaps. you do notjudge life by the hand that people are dealt, you judge life by how they play the hand. how they deal with it.

you have to deal with it. i dealt with it by burying it and only very gradually, recently, have i been able to resurrect it. i totally take the point about the burial of it emotionally and personally, but you didn't bury it entirely because it clearly coloured your consciousness, your awareness of how the world works. if we get onto the beginnings of your film—making and television—drama—making career, you always had a very strong sense that there are powerful people in society, but there are a lot more powerless people, people who have bad stuff happen to them and for whom the system does not really work. you were quite radical, quite young. yes, just to tease that out a little bit, first of all my work has been about secrets. my whole childhood and adolescence was that i did not want any more secrets. i interrogated relatives

mercilessly, ijust wanted to know. looking back on it now, these connections were unconscious to me until recently, my work is that i want to expose the secrets. like, for instance, we did a film, newman wrote the screenplays and les blair directed them, about the metropolitan police detectives in the ‘70s. i wanted to know the truth. and the abuses that were within the police force? the abuses in the police. the police had interrogated my dad, there had been a policeman outside the house, they had followed him wherever he went. after your mother's death? yes, because they wanted to find the abortionist. my dad didn't shop, he didn't say anything, he killed himself. so that is one aspect of it. let's go to a clip which will give people, many of whom are young

and will not know your work so well, let's go to a clip that encapsulates the degree to which you in the end dramatised some of the terrible things that you had somewhere in your own consciousness. let's start with up thejunction, a drama that you made in 1965, had a huge audience on the bbc, obviously filmed in black and white. it was all about a backstreet abortion. let's play a little, and quite difficult to watch, clip. let's look at this. grunts and cries take the lowest figure, 52,000 abortions a year. that is 1,000 abortions a week. something like five or six every hour, of every day. and that is taking the minimum figure. it is a pretty extraordinary piece of film because there you have got, obviously we've only taken a short clip, but you have a very graphic portrayal of a woman in the middle

of terrible suffering but you chose, in a pretty new and revolutionary way for television, to juxtapose that with a very measured, dispassionate voice, giving some true facts, some journalism, about the scale of the problem of illegal abortions. it was a mix of drama and fact, which britain hadn't really seen before. no, a lot of it was new. that voice—over was my gp. was it? my doctor from kentish town, dr grant. was it? his speciality was pregnancy and birth and so on. he knew a lot about it. did you tell anybody that you wanted to be involved in this project partly because your own mother had died in a backstreet abortion? no. i told no one. why? i don't know why. why would i?

because that would give everybody a sense of how much it mattered to you. i don't know, in birmingham we don't talk about stuff, we keep things to ourselves. why would i burden people with all of that? there's one thing i want to correct, if i may? it is an inexcusable shorthand for you to say "films that i made". i have never made a film. ever. produced is the right word. yes. you could say i had a role in it if i produced it, or wrote it, or directed it, but for me films are social activities. they are not like novels. i have always gathered people around me who have worked together very closely. one of the men you have worked closest with is ken loach. and, of course, ken loach has had a fantastic career and has won prizes at cannes and

all over the world. you and he, i think, are regarded as pioneers of and revolutionaries working with this idea of social realism, of using actors who are encouraged to extemporise, to be spontaneous, not to obsess about memorising scripts but to let drama unfold and live with the drama unfolding. how new was all of that and do you accept this notion that you set a trend that still matters to a great many film makers around the world ? well, i don't know, i don't see much sign of the trend now, frankly. i never thought of it like that. this all started for me as an actor and the terrible way actors are treated, were treated and still are to some extent, by everybody. i thought they had got everything

wrong, everything wrong with their attitudes to screenplays, their attitude to lights and cameras. the actor was in the service of all of that, but i wanted all of that to be in the service of the actor. it is the audience that sees the actor or the character — they should not even see the actor. when i met ken, we were up both working on the wednesday play. we did not have to talk very much because we just knew of each other. he'd seen the light too. ken is the finest director of actors, of conjuring a performance from actors, that i've ever worked with. we were brothers from the start. talking of truthful performances and the power that television drama can generate, let's look to one more clip that is perhaps the most famous project you collaborated on and that is a drama called cathy come home, which exposed

the problem of poverty and homelessness in the britain of the mid—sixties. this scene we are going to see is very upsetting. it is based on a true life story, it is where the authorities have come to take away the children of a young mother. let's have a look. you are not having my babies. screaming and crying get off! i tell you what, it is hard to watch that and not feel a stab of pain in your heart. well, i felt it because i had lost my mum. i had been taken in by the family,

what your mum is your mum. there was an advertisement when i was young for something that said, "accept no substitutes". there are no substitutes. you mum is your mum. what i am thinking about was the degree to which your films had such an impact that they became almost part of the political discourse in britain. correct me if i am wrong, but i think you had a meeting with the british government's housing minister as a result of cathy come home, the furore, 12—14 million people had watched it, the nation was talking about this problem of young people who could not get homes, who were forced out of homes and ended up losing theirfamilies. you made a difference. do you feel your films, going back to the ‘60s and beyond, made a difference? it depends on what you mean by making a difference. when i was young and arrogant, i thought we could make a film and change the world. films don't do that. the most that a film can do, to use an old political phrase, is raise consciousness, so that people who are active in politics can be affected and then they can change the world. we did have a meeting,

jeremy sandford, the writer, and ken loach, the director, and me with the minister at the ministry in a beautiful and huge room in whitehall — i have never had a flat as big as that — and it was a very english occasion. he was there with his permanent secretary. we sat down for tea. the china was very nice and the biscuits were palpable. we sipped tea while we talked. he was very complimentary about the film but in the end said, "what can one do?". i said, "build more houses". he looked at his permanent secretary and she smiled back at him. then we were on the street again in whitehall. i take the point. maybe it didn't change anything in the short term, but there are two things that strike me and the first one is this: ifind it hard, being a professional

and having worked in tv for quite a while myself, ifind hard today to think of film—makers and films on television or on the big screen that have the same kind of impact that would warrant or encourage a government minister to call in the film—maker for talks about the subject at hand. do you think radical boundary—pushing stuff is being made today on television or in film in the same way you were doing it in the ‘60s? there may be some political films for the cinema, for the arthouse circuit, very low budget being made here and certainly there are in other countries, but you will not see it on television. nothing to do with the quality of the film—makers, but because it would not be allowed. television now is different business. do you mean the bosses? the people that run organisations like mine, the bbc, have lost their nerve? they are no longer interested in being radical? in confrontation and saying difficult things? i do. i don't blame them as individuals necessarily. we can talk about the bbc. the bbc lives in a cultural and political environment.

it affects that environment and it is affected by it. but if you wanted to make a film like cathy come home today, would you find an easy place to put it on mainstream terrestrial television? i doubt it and in any case i wouldn't, if i were still working in films, i would not want to produce a film like cathy today. cathy let everybody off the hook. cathy was not a political enough. cathy was a nice, soft, liberalfilm. it wasn't seen that way at the time. it didn't put the boot in where it should have done. that is what i would want to do now.

there would be no chance now. by the way, to finish that point quickly, when we did cathy come home, there was a homeless problem but it wasn't that huge. most people knew nothing about it. whenjeremy sandford told us about it, because he had researched it, neither ken nor i knew there was homeless problem. it went out and caused a stir, to put it mildly. now there is a huge problem of homelessness and housing. that is acknowledged by everyone. television does a documentary every week or two on it and it is in the newspapers, but no one cares. the politicians of all parties have neglected it for 30 or a0 years, but they are our politicians so maybe we live in a country that does not care as it used to. your staples, the films you are known for, for having collaborated on, are all about class, powerlessness of so many people in society, corruption and abuse, abuse of power. when you look at britain today, britain that has just voted brexit and exposed all sorts of new divisions between young

and old, north and south, urban and rural, poor and wealthy, when you look at britain today, do you look at a society that is in worse shape than it was when you set out on your film—making career? it is in worse shape but it is also in better shape. there are all sorts of wonderful things happening. we value our individuality, we cooperate and compete. it is finding a balance between those two elements in society and now we are far too much individuals, the competition has cancelled out the cooperation and we are an unhappy society because we are unbalanced. we need to get the balance back. if you wanted to make people care today by force of a creative medium, would you choose television or would you try to harness the internet? what would you do?

if tony garnett wasn't 80 but was 25 and setting out to influence people, influence debate, and change the world, how would you go about it? i would, without hesitation, be working on the internet. the barriers to entry into our business have more or less disappeared. when i started very few people were allowed, because it was so expensive and the technology was so complex to master. now, any kid in a provincial town can get a digital camera which is point and shoot. they can edit on their laptop. server space is cheap. they are there for billions of people. no one will know you're there, but that is a marketing problem and kids find things. the final thought, and it may be bleak or it may not, the kind of serious message and the serious analysis of how

society works that you have always wanted to make, is that going to find a big audience anyway? is that ever going to go viral or are people too busy looking at cute cats? it depends on how good you are. when we were making films for television, there were all sorts of other things that people could look at. the problem now is that it is all available all the time. there is too much? it is not that there is too much, the choice is there all the time, whereas when there were two channels of television it was one after the other. but you still had to get people to watch. i want to end by going back to where we started and your decision, after so many years, decades and decades of bottling up the personal that has been so much of a part of your life through all this professional success, you have now unbottled and you have been very open about your own tragedy and trauma. have you conquered your demons, do you think?

i am a lot happier. do any of us ever conquer all of our demons? as an old psychoanalyst friend of mine who said, it is our scars the make us interesting. but i'm happier now. that is a great way to end, a happy thought to end with. tony garnett thank you for being on hardtalk. thank you. sunday was a pretty glorious day for much of the country, a top of 26.3 celsius. we saw plenty of blue sky, although a lot of cloud in western scotland.

we are likely to break records for bank holiday monday, this was the last record set back in 1999. several places will be that today and one or two places could make it to 28 celsius and that could be the north and the west of london. we start the morning off on a fairly fresh note across eastern areas, but lots of sunshine across most areas with northern ireland and southern scotland. always more cloud, west of scotland is that weather front getting a bit cooler as well. those temperatures in the mid—20s celsius. as we head into monday night it looks like it will be another dry and clear one, some changes at the west and outbreaks of rain, so here it will be fairly mild and a bit full and a clear skies. the pressure pattern for tuesday,

low pressure moving in off the atlantic introducing slightly cooler air like this weather front. for tuesday itself it will be quite a cloudy, wet and breezy day for northern ireland, pushing into scotland and also western parts of england and into wales as well. could see a few heavy showers, maybe some thunderstorms, here it will be another hot and sunny day. further north and west it will be cooler temperatures returning closer to seasonal. as we had to wednesday, another area of low pressure moving in off the atlantic on this one more energy off it with more active weather fronts. it means we are starting off on a fine note for much of the country on wednesday.

this weather system starts pushing into northern ireland, scotland and into north—west england and wales and heavy rain. maybe thundery. further east, we will do pretty well again, with temperatures reaching 21 degrees with sunshine. as we move into thursday, a bridge of high—pressure, but it will feel full and fresher and fairly brisk westerly wind, a few showers especially across western hills and western wales as well. some good spells of sunshine. not a bad looking day for thursday, temperatures cooler from around 13—17 celsius. the general trend is that it will cool down, back in the air and a normal with sunshine and showers. this is the briefing. i'm samantha simmonds. our top story: the diplomatic push is on. britain's foreign secretary urges president trump not to abandon the iran nuclear deal. another brexit warning. the uk's hospitality industry says it'll struggle to recruit staff once britain leaves the eu. a new development in the rape

and murder case that has shocked india, as the supreme court weighs in to the row. six more years! vladimir putin is set to begin another term as russia's president. we'll take a look at how oil prices and sanctions are affecting the country's economy.