Duncan Hess spent 40 fulfilling, fascinating years directing for the BBC: “Every news programme there ever was; Antiques Roadshow; I travelled all over making documentaries …” His career culminated with directing the corporation’s coverage of the Queen’s lying in state last September. It was Hess who chose to feature the footage of Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby that scandalised the nation. “They weren’t queue jumping at all!” he says. “They were just walking past.”
But all that time, Hess had nourished a different dream, one born on a school trip to the RSC in Stratford aged 15 to see a production of Henry V. “I didn’t understand Shakespeare particularly but I found the whole experience thrilling. There was a wonderful Welsh actor called Emrys James who did [the chorus’s speech]: ‘Oh for a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.’ I’m crying thinking about it now.” Galvanised, he wrote to the RSC asking if he could come back and hang around between shows, bagging a community centre floor to sleep on. He returned several times, listening to records of his hero, Laurence Olivier, at night in his sleeping bag after performances.
