Helen Mirren Remembers… Blue Remembered Hills

Dame Helen Mirren looks back on her role in Dennis Potter’s seminal 1979 TV drama Blue Remembered Hills, one of the best-known episodes of the BBC’s much-admired Play for Today series. The drama famously featured adult actors taking on the roles of seven-year-old children as they explore, play and fight during a day of adventure in the Forest of Dean, where Potter himself spent time as a boy. The unusual casting was a deliberate choice of Potter’s that aimed to challenge conventional ideas around the innocence of childhood, and here Dame Helen describes how they prepared for the roles, the effect that playing children had on the group and why it still remains one of the productions that she is most proud of.