The sun is rising above a Roman amphitheatre just outside Cirencester, where two police officers have been called to the scene. Lurking inside this historic ruin is a truly grisly surprise: a man has been suspended from a sideways wooden cross. This is not, as you’d be forgiven for assuming, the introduction to a particularly disturbing episode of a Midsomer Murders spin-off, or some middle England reboot of The Wicker Man. Welcome, instead, to the opening chapter of Richard Madeley’s new novel, Father’s Day.
It’s a scene that the veteran broadcaster retold with his imitable panache during a recent appearance on BBC Radio 2. “There’s a man who has been crucified,” he told host Michael Ball. “He’s very dead.” Madeley’s synopsis, with all its unusual over-enunciations and meandering non-sequiturs about Roman history (did we really need to know the amphitheatre’s seating capacity in the first century AD?), was an inevitable hit on Twitter/X. “I was listening to this yesterday and nearly crashed the car,” one social media user wrote in response.
