Dominic Sandbrook

Lord Randolph is literally driven mad, possibly by sexually transmitted disease.

Jenny Jerome is a monstrous person, an American heiress who marries Lord Randolph.

They basically pack Winston off to prep school and then to Harrow.

There are stories he's not allowed to come home at Christmas, for example, because it will interfere with his mother's affair with an Austrian diplomat.

We have letters from him to his mother and father begging them to come and visit him in Harrow, and they don't come.

They, in fact, write it back to him and say, stop snivelling, you brat, you're so wet, you're such a failure, leave us alone.

And it's actually very moving, and you can see how with a different kind of character, Churchill would have had a tremendous sense of, he could have been a self-pitying, sort of victimhood, all of this stuff.

But actually,

There's an internal jollity to him, a zest for life, a jauntiness, and I think that propels him.

But also a sense of destiny, isn't it?

A sense of destiny.

There's a wonderful story about him after, I think, Evensong at Harrow with another boy, and they went downstairs and they were chatting, and this boy said to him, what do you think you do when you grow up?

And Churchill said, you know, and this boy said, well, I'll be probably a diplomat like my father or maybe a businessman.

And Churchill said, you know, he sort of looked misty-eyed into the middle distance and said, one day London will be under attack and it will fall to me to save London and the empire and all of this.

That's just how he spoke when he was 14.

LAUGHTER

So I think you have to have the stage as well as the actor.

And the stage is really important.

So obviously when Churchill is born in 1874, Britain is top nation.

Britain does bestride the world like a colossus.