Captive audience
/.../ McCarthy has condemned the film on the basis he has no wish to see himself portrayed as "a character dreamt up by a scriptwriter".

Research began on the film over a year before McCarthy was freed, initially with the support of many of the hostage's friends and relatives, including Jill Morrell. Ironically, if McCarthy was still incarcerated in a Beirut cell, the film would probably be acclaimed as a campaigning effort to draw attention to the hostages' plight. Instead. the end of the hostage ordeal and the non-coorperation of the British hostages has called into question the veracity of the drama-doc and the justification for making it. There's a whiff of exploitation, of turning trauma into entertainment.

Colin Firth, who plays McCarthy, is uneasy about the documentary tag. "this is not a documentary at all" he insists. "It's drama based on events". Firth even asked if the characters names could be changed. Unlike Falklands casualty Robert Lawrence, whom Firth befriended when he portrayed him in Tumbledown, McCarthy isn't real to Firth. "This was a man who only exists on the evidence of Alasdair's (Palmer, associate producer) research and what I've seen on television and the newspapers. I had to think 'I'm playing a fictional character who exists in this script'.

It's this grey area between fact and fiction that is the film's fatal flaw. Drama documentary is only effective as a device to clarify facts - it doesn't have an imaginative life of its own. Granada TV used the technique powerfully in investigative films like Why Lockerbie and Who bombed Birmingham? but Hostages is drama-led and weighted down by the demands of documentary. When Bernard MacLaverty's script strays away from the hard facts into the cell or behind the scenes at home with Jill Morrell (Natter Richardson) or Peggy Say (Kathy Bates) the effect is jarring and intrusive. The resilience of the human spirit, the source of fascination, is never really tackled.

"We don't have a problem with a documentary that tells the truth or a drama that doesn't purport to tell the truth but tries to get to the core of the issues", explains Mark Lucas, agent of both John McCarthy and Terry Waite. "Nobody's denying the public's right to know." McCarthy has sent a letter of support to David Pugh, producer of Frank McGuinness's play Someone Who'll Watch Over Me, currently in the West End and loosely based on Brian Keenan's experiences. Hors La Vie, about French hostage Roger Auque, also told a powerful story of human fortitude. Sadly, not even expensive production values and an excellent cast can elevate Hostages above and beyond its constraints. In its efforts to be truthful, the film seems less than honest. [Article by Elaine Paterson]

No longer a hostage to the past
Interview with John McCarthy in The London Time, October 19, 2000.

John McCarthy was in a taxi when a colleague asked how long he had been back. "Back? Back from where?" answered McCarthy. It took several seconds for him to realise that the person was referring to the five years he spent as a political hostage, chained to a radiator in a filthy Beirut cellar. "For a minute I didn't know what he meant," he says cheerfully. "Then he was saying to me 'Is it two years now?' and I was thinking 'Or is it five?' and I couldn't remember. You do completely forget about it."

McCarthy has, in fact, been free for nine years and relates the anecdote to illustrate how much he has managed to consign that dark, terrifying period to his past. It was a crystallising moment which proved that he had evolved from "John McCarthy, former hostage", to John McCarthy, 43, husband, journalist, who doesn't go to the gym as often as he should.

McCarthy's recovery from 1,943 days of being shackled, blindfolded and beaten appears to have been little short of miraculous. He is well-adjusted, urbane, and, most impressively, is able to see a funny side to his ordeal.

But surely he must still think about it every day, even if only for a second? "About being locked up? No, no, not at all," he replies. "I don't have nightmares about it either but if I'm very busy at work and there are deadlines looming I might have a dream that is capture related. It's because the sub-conscious looks for something stressful to focus on."

Incredibly, when he was first kidnapped and placed in solitary confinement he had a recurring dream about re-doing his A Levels. "At one point I remember saying to to myself, 'Look, this is ridiculous: you've got A Levels, you've got a degree, you've got a job and you've been kidnapped by a bunch of people in the Middle East, now try and focus on that," he says with laugh.

McCarthy's public relations assistant had warned that he would not want to talk about the past. In fact, the opposite turned out to be true; it is his present that he is reluctant to discuss. Any inquiry about his domestic situation, such as plans that he may have with his new wife, Anna Ottewill, makes him visibly uncomfortable. After years of being denied any privacy or the freedom to assert the slightest control over his life, it is crucial to him now.

There is, of course, another reason why he is so guarded about his private life. His previous relationship, with Jill Morrell, his girlfriend at the time of capture and the nation's sweetheart who campaigned relentlessly for his release, was placed under a global magnifying glass. Everybody wanted John and Jill to get back together after his release. They did. Then they wanted them to get married. They didn't. The relationship was tracked until it ended in a short statement issued by McCarthy in 1995. Friends said that they had been denied the chance to be an ordinary couple because of the pressure of producing a perfect ending.

Equally significantly perhaps, medical experts who examined McCarthy said that, despite appearing more happy-go-lucky than the more complex, cerebral Brian Keenan, the hostage with whom he spent most of his captivity, he was the most traumatised.

McCarthy stresses that while he and Jill are still good friends, he has learnt lessons from the way they handled the public gaze. He was determined from the outset that the media would stay out of his new relationship with Ottewill, a former BBC books editor who has given up work to spend more time with him.

"We agreed the wedding would be a private affair," he says. "When I came home from Lebanon it was a massive shock to see how famous (Jill and I) were, but we soon realised that if you didn't give interviews all the time about the latest stage of development it didn't matter a damn and you could get on with your life."

His relationship with Ottewill is strong, he says, because from the outset she saw him not as a former hostage but as simply John McCarthy. "She helped me to move on. I suppose it's in giving one a sense of normality and building a new home and a new future and doing it within a partnership. My idea of hell is letting the cameras into my house, like Through the Keyhole," he says. "There is a danger when you start living your private life in public. In modern times being in the public eye can be seen as the be all and end all. It's easy to read the Hello! magazines and the tabloid gossip pages or whatever and think 'goodness, how fascinating', but then you take a step back and think, surely that's not the right thing to do?" McCarthy is aware of the paradox here. He wrote a book with Jill, Some Other Rainbow, which was marketed as a love story: the account of a relationship that endured despite forcible separation. It was a bestseller and it was natural that its readers would continue to be interested in what they did next.

"There is a part of your life that you've written about and it is public property. And it's a privilege to work in the public domain but you must be wary of living like that because you put an inbalance on a real existence. My private life is ultimately most important, and that's the bit I think's just for me and the intimates around me."

One of those intimates continues to be Keenan. While chained together they fantasised about trekking through the wide open spaces of Chile. Years after their release they managed it, and together wrote a humorous, inspiring travel book, Between Extremes, which is now available in paperback (Between Extremesby John McCarthy and Brian KeenanBantam, £6.99).

"This book says we've both gone on, we've had this great adventure together which was born of that time . . . but now we can carry on and be separate and be like any other couple of mates."

The book illustrates the difference between the two men's attitudes to their private lives. McCarthy scarcely mentions Anna or explains who she is, save for writing that she packed some blue cycling shorts into his rucksack for the trip. Keenan is more relaxed about revealing his emotions, and publishes his personal faxes home, always beginning each one "Hello Sweetheart".

McCarthy would rather talk about issues, such as the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, for which he still works and to whom he donated his £80,000 fee when he appeared in a commercial for One 2 One mobile phones.

"Working with the Foundation gave a valid purpose to my experience, it made sense of it. When I came out people lauded me, celebrated me, but there are people who had suffered far worse and lost much more than I did."

"These were not people who were chained up for years and occasionally got beaten, they were appallingly tortured. A lot of them are having the final humiliation of being driven out of their countries. They lost career and status. They deserve a bit of the welcoming and warmth Brian and I had."

McCarthy's own career continues to be a priority for him. He wants to be taken seriously as a journalist in his own right rather than as a "celebrity" writer "The experience, " he says has changed him. "I'm not such a time waster now. I take the view that life is for living but also to be fulfilling. It seems to be much more purposeful these days. I'm not so much of a lad.. I've realised there's a lot more to life than just to party."

Yet McCarthy can never forgive his captors for the fact that his mother Sheila died while he was still a captive, not knowing whether he was alive or dead. "I can never forget the times of horror that I and my friends and family went through. My mother being very ill and dying without a cast iron reassurance that I was even there . . . ", he tails off, but recovers. "But I've learned to grieve now. My father then died but I've got my brother. That's great, but you can't say it's all for the good. There have been some very bad times." McCarthy once famously described himself as "uptight". Has he learnt to show his emotions more now? "I wouldn't now call myself uptight but I don't cry a lot. The last time I was close to tears was over the story of the Siamese twins. It was a desperate situation for the parents, and for the judges having to make a terrible decision. I found it incredibly moving."

McCarthy mentions twice that Keenan now has a young family. Might he and Anna have a family? There is a long silence before he says: "I really don't want to get into all that." He looks distractedly around the room before adding "I'm sure I would like to at some point." The subject is closed and McCarthy wraps his blanket of privacy around him once again. He wants to get on with his life, and it is probably time that we let him. [Article by Carol Midgley]