“They put me on the cover of Newsweek” – Richard III ends his Legal London Virtual Tour

This one’s the last four minutes of Richard III’s dress rehearsal for his Legal London – the Inns of Court Virtual Tour. Four minutes in which he talks about his personal run-ins with the law. Which led to him being on the cover of Newsweek. And then we get the reaction of his fellow guides to his Legal London – the Inns of Court VT – half a dozen of them attended the dress rehearsal.

This is Richard III on Illegal London. 95 percent of the tour was about Legal London. And. It. Was. Fascinating. Every last micro-second of it. Learned so much. Saw so much. And was wonderfully entertained into the bargain (yet another reminder, as if any were needed, that actors make wonderful guides and that’s why we have a troupe of gifted actors on the team).

But the bigger point here is the tour, from first to last was an Aladdin’s Cave of delights – I knew Richard III has a long and honourable career allegedly on the wrong side of the law (successfully defending himself against the Public Order Act) but I had no idea that it climaxed with him on the cover of Newsweek!* That one was for his anti-Poll Tax stridency (love the grimace on his face as he’s marched off arm in arm with the long arm of the law). Nor that he had, as he put it, in effect spent the 1980s camped out in front of the South African embassy protesting against apartheid. *Hard to know which is the bigger deal, his being on the cover of Newsweek or his addressing the United Nations General Assembly.

And stay tuned – i.e., stop back here fairly soon – because sometime in the next few days we’ll put up, as a podcast, a juicy clip from the body of Richard III’s Legal London – the Inns of Court Virtual Tour. Probably that eye-opening bit – it’s more than eye-opening, my eyes were out on stalks – about the Hieronymus Bosch-like character of the law in mediaeval England.