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Behind the Scenes Russell Lewis ​ ​ Russell Lewis (born 11 September 1963 in London) is an English television writer and former actor. He has worked hard to preserve his anonymity so there is little about his background to be found online. Lewis was born in 1963 in Battersea, south London, raised and formally adopted by his maternal grandmother and her second husband, who provided his surname. He speaks of “a certain lived experience of dark secrets and unhappy families that has stood me in good stead when it comes to Endeavour”. Protective of “the sensitivities of all concerned who are still alive”, he describes his background as “potentially still a bit of an emotional minefield”. Lewis was a child actor.He attended “an academically wonky stage school” between age four and 16, which is why there’s a photo of him on an obscure website: he landed a part in the 1972 period biopic Young Winston, directed by Richard Attenborough, playing the even younger Winston. External Website

Non Fiction Connecting with Young People in Trouble: Risk, Relationships and Lived Experience Andi Brierley 2021 In this book, Andi Brierley - who has lived experience of both the care and juvenile justice systems, critiques the UK youth justice system, arguing that the way things are done now often causes more harm than good. Instead, he says, his PACT (presence, attunement, connect & trust) approach is far more effective. External Website

Non Fiction We Don't Know Ourselves. A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958 Fintan O'Toole 2021 Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves. A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958 (2021) includes references to: a. The industrial schools system (established in 1868 to care for “neglected, orphaned and abandoned children”) and the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse in Ireland (established 2000). The Commission resulted in what’s known as Ryan Report (2009) and which concluded that many children had been subject to physical, sexual and emotional violence. Perpetrators were protected to preserve the reputation of the institutions. b. Magdalen Laundries: institutions in which pregnant girls and women were incarcerated, often for the rest of their lives. Many of the children born in the laundries were transferred to the industrial schools. c. Mother-and-baby homes, from which many children were sold to American families in a lucrative adoption business endorsed by the state. O’Toole also tells the story of the Dunne family, one of whom in 1961 tried to expose the brutality going in the industrial schools but who couldn’t get his book published. External Website

Films/Videos The Woman in the Window (film) ​ 2021 The Woman in the Window is an upcoming American psychological thriller film directed by Joe Wright, from a screenplay by Tracy Letts, based on the 2018 novel of the same name by pseudonymous author A. J. Finn. An agoraphobic psychologist befriends a neighbor across the street from her New York City brownstone condo, only to see her own life turned upside down when the woman disappears and she suspects foul play. The Woman in the Window is a smart, sophisticated film of psychological suspense that recalls the best of Hitchcock and features an adopted teenage boy. External Website

Non Fiction The State of It Chris 2021 Government cuts, unregulated care homes, inadequate staff training - campaigner and care home consultant Chris Wild has seen it all. The low standards and frequent abuse of children in care has long been a focal point of his loud message: we are failing our young people and something needs to change. Chris delves deep into the lives of care home kids, from experiences with county lines, drugs, trafficking, knife crime, gang violence to child exploitation and sexual abuse. He tells the stories of the voiceless, the children who have been left behind, compounded by his own experiences of growing up in care. How is the care system failing our young people and controlling just who and what they can become? What help do we really give children after their time in care is over, left to fend for themselves? Is it too late to fix the state of it? External Website

Performing Arts Wolfie Ross Willis 2019 In Ross Willis’s emotive, strange debut play, a newborn pair of twin girls slither and kick their way into a world that doesn’t know what to do with them. So they’re separated. One is raised by a ‘soggy lady’ who soaks in the tub all day, too depressed to care for her. The other one is raised by a she-wolf in a forest of rehomed children. ‘Wolfie’ uses its own feral language to howl out the pain of kids who get failed by Britain’s care system, and it’s powerful and mystifying by turns. The central twins in Lisa Spirling’s production are played by Sophie Melville (star of ‘Iphigenia in Splott’) and Erin Doherty; they’re both fascinatingly good actors, and it’s a joy to see them in Theatre503’s intimate space, which has been transformed into a kind of space-womb by designer Basia Binkowska. Round mirrors sparkle from its walls, and Melville and Doherty leap across it in brightly coloured boiler-suits, deftly handling this text’s sudden shifts of location and tone. Its best moments use surreal images to capture something real. Brenda, who works in a hard times charity, literally cuts out her kidney and throws it at one of the twins, in a gorily vivid metaphor for middle-class guilt. Or when a mega-obsessive doting mother gets high by snorting her own child’s powdered milk teeth. Other parts feel a bit more opaque. The foster system is imagined as a forest where kids are raised by owls or bees or foxes, as overseen by the lofty, compassionless trees. It’s hilarious, but its whimsical enviro-satire paints the world of fostering as impossibly far away from the ‘real world’, when foster parents are just as human as birth ones. And even though they’re thickly coated in woodland whimsy, the beats of this story’s birth-to-adulthood narrative can feel a bit familiar. External Website

Poetry Tender Fingers in a Clenched Fist (OUT OF PRINT) Lemn Sissay 1988 In this collection of poetry, Lemn Sissay has written about South Africa - prisons, armed struggles - as well as Manchester, UK. External Website

News - broadcast, print, internet, magazine articles Prince Philip: A turbulent childhood stalked by exile, mental illness and death Prince Philip 2021 Prince Philip was only eight when he was suddenly separated from his parents and his four elders sisters. He never lived with his immediate family again. The youngest child of Prince andrew of Greece and Denmark and Princess Alice of Battenberg, Philip was left in the care of Alice's family in England after his mother suffered a breakdown and was hospitalised. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Doctor Zhivago Boris Leonidovich Pasternak 2011 Set in Russia during the first half of the twentieth century during the most radical revolution of the age. Seen through the life of Yuri Zhivago, physician and poet, who has to come to terms with the new world and his love for two women. As a young boy he was in kinship care with his uncle. External Website

Films/Videos Re-homing': America's shocking trade in unwanted children ​ 2018 A disturbing story about the unregulated practice in the United States of 're-homing' children who have been adopted. Events are held where children get to parade before prospective parents, and some get taken on 'probation'. Events are held where children get to parade before prospective parents, and some get taken on 'probation'. 0 years in prison for their crimes against children. External Website

Radio & Podcast Charlie Chaplin Dan Snow's History Hit 2023 With Dan Snow to discuss Chaplin’s long life in all its complications (is Paul Duncan, author of the Charlie Chaplin Archives. As the men say, in many ways Chaplin’s The Tramp was autobiographical, a reflection of Chaplin’s poverty stricken childhood. However, as a successful man in Hollywood, Chaplin had disturbing relationships with girls who starred in his films and was eventually exiled from the USA on instruction by J. Edgar Hoover. External Website

Authors P Sancho: An Act of Rememberance ➝ Back to Top

Films/Videos Without Gorky ​ 2011 In Without Gorky (2011), the artist's granddaughter, Cosima Spender, directs her filmmaking skills to explore her own family. Ashile Gorky (1904-1948) was a survivor of the Armenian Genocide, who, after his mother died of starvation, made his way to the US, changed his name and began to study art and develop his own style of abstract expressionism. The last years of Ashile's life were difficult and therefore difficult for his young wife, Agnes Magruder, who endured the man's mood swings and likekly violence. After Ashile killed himself, Agnes sent her 2 young daughters off to boarding school in Switzerland for 6 months while she traveled Europe. Natasha was only 3 and still angry with her mother 63 years later about being abandoned, such was the impact. External Website

Performing Arts Maroochy Barambah Maroochy Barambah ​ Maroochy Barambah (b. circa 1950) is an Australian Aboriginal mezzo-soprano singer. She is a song-woman, law-woman and elder of the Turrbal people. Maroochy Barambah was born Yvette Isaacs in the town of Cherboug in Queensland. During the 1970s Yvette was able to attend the Melba Conservatorium of Music on a scholarship and the Victorian College of Arts. She graduated in 1979. She went on to establish her own jazz group and in 1982 appeared in Episode 3 of the Women of the Sun historical drama series. Yvette changed her name to Maroochy Barambah in 1982. Maroochy Barambah performed in the 1989 production of Black River—the first Aboriginal Australian to perform opera on stage—for the Sydney Metropolitican Opera, in the Bran Nue Dae musical the following year, and in 1991 “was awarded the inaugural Aboriginal performing arts fellowship by the Aboriginal Arts Committee.” External Website

Authors N What is Life?: Understand Biology in Five Steps ➝ Back to Top

Films/Videos Take Care of Maya ​ 2023 Take Care of Maya (2023) is a documentary (on Netflix) telling the story of what happened to Maya Kowalski when she was 10 and admitted to the Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in St Petersburg, Florida. Hospital staff expressed concern about the treatment Maya was already receiving (under medical guidance) and alerted the child protection team. Dr Sally Smith, the medical director the child protection team, decided that Maya’s mother had Munchausen syndrome by proxy. May Kowalski was then removed from the care of her parents and held in state custody (while remaining in hospital). The Kowalskis have filed a lawsuit against Johns Hopkins, with a trail set to start in September 2023. External Website

Films/Videos The Witches ​ 2020 The Witches (2020) is based on the 1983 novel of the same name by Roald Dahl and stars Anne Hathaway, Octavia Spencer and Stanley Tucci. In 1968, Charlie Hansen is orphaned when his parents are killed in a car accident. He goes to live with his grandmother (Octavia Spencer) and has an encounter with witches. After he's been turned into a mouse, Charlie and his 2 friends - children who've also been turned into mice - enact revenge on the coven of witches meeting in a hotel under the pretext of protecting children. External Website

Non Fiction We Were Once a Family Roxanna Asgarian 2023 We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death and Child Removal in America (2023) by investigative journalist, Roxanna Asgarian, is the harrowing story of a murder-suicide. In 2018, a white married couple drove their car over a cliff along the Pacific Coast Highway. The 2 women had adopted 6 African American children, 3 siblings each from 2 families. 5 of those children were now dead, and 1 was missing. Asgarian centres the birth families of the dead children and uncovers a disturbing system of racial bias when removing children and a lack of knowledge about prospective adoptive parents. External Website

Poets David O'Brien David O'Brien ​ Australian poet, David O'Brien (b. 1957), spent his childhood in orphanages. David and his three siblings were abandoned by their parents in the late 1950s and made Wards of the (South Australia) State. David grew up in a Catholic orphanage with his brother, later attending a Catholic boarding school. The boys were separated from their two sisters.David has had a varied career, including working as a model. He's been living in the Blue Mountains, NSW, for more than 20 years. Two years ago he set up the Blackheath Community OpShop. Encouraging men to live in a more peaceful way - with other humans and with the earth - is the theme running through his 2014 book, A Hunbler Mankind. External Website

Authors Y Baroness Lola Young of Hornsey ➝ Back to Top