The king and I

THE millions who watched the Channel 4 documentary charting the adventures of screenwriter Philippa Langley as she pinpointed the spot where Richard III’s remains were unearthed may be forgiven for viewing her as an emotional eccentric obsessed with Richard III.

However, as Philippa tells me from her home in Edinburgh, that would be more to do with programme makers editing more than 40 hours of footage down to 70 minutes presenting her as “a woman getting upset about bones”.

The reality of Philippa’s quest involved five years of painstaking research during which she had to convince academic experts and fight her corner against those too easily dismissive of an enthusiastic “Ricardian” with no formal training in archaeology or history.

It was, says Philippa, “a quest for the truth”

and her unwavering desire to find the remains of England’s last Plantagenet king has led to one of the most remarkable historical discoveries of recent times.

Philippa and a team of archaeologists excavated the king’s remains from a Leicester Council car park last August and were thrilled when, on February 4, the skeleton was confirmed as that of Richard III. The news delighted Philippa, but she was already pretty certain of her find thanks to an intuitive feeling she had when she first visited the car park in 2009 and “felt” that Richard was buried underneath it.

“I get this feeling whenever a powerful truth is given to me; I go cold and get goosebumps,”

she says. “I have had it all my life, and when it happened in the car park that is exactly when I knew I was standing on his grave.”

Social media sites such as Twitter and facebook were ablaze with the news as millions worldwide gleefully shared the details of a story which almost seemed too bizarre to be true.

“It has been surprising,” she says. “I honestly didn’t think there would be this much interest in a medieval king, but maybe that was naive.

“It took five years of research; yes, I had a funny feeling in the car park, but that was just the catalyst. Before that there were years of documenting and I had to present a really good case to Leicester Council and the university.

Obviously if I had walked in and said ‘I have a really funny feeling about something in your car park’ they would have laughed me out of the room.”

Philippa, who spent her childhood in Darlington and still sees it as her home town, admits that the worldwide attention her discovery attracted has been something of a shock.

For her, it was a single-minded and personal journey to uncover the truth behind the muchmaligned king and fuel the historical drama she was writing about him.

“One of the hardest things is that people don’t get my connection with Richard III, but when you are a screenwriter you walk a thousand miles in your protagonist’s shoes,” she says.

“This isn’t me being a fan of Richard III, or being in love with him or any other nonsense, it is me trying to understand this man and wanting to get to the heart of who he was.”

Philippa’s passion to uncover the truth about Richard III was ignited back in 1998 when she read a biography about him written by Paul Murray Kendall.

“I had never been taught about him at school, all I knew of him was Shakespeare’s monstrous villain, but this book was full of historical research and documentation and it showed a picture of a completely different man. I just had to know more,” she says.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

So what’s next for the woman who unearthed King Richard III from a council car park?

PHILIPPA has no intentions of moving into academia and is gracious about the unpleasant grumblings from some professors and academics who appeared to belittle the historical significance of her find.

“It’s very different in the academic world because their careers are on the line,” she says.

“So for any academic to want to question or dismiss the work of professor after professor, I say it takes a very brave man or woman to stand up and do that.

“The academics who know me, who have been involved with our research for years and years, have been great to a man and a woman; they have been brilliant.”

The immediate future for Philippa involves working on two more television documentaries for Channel 4 and its sister station, More 4, and trying to find a broadcaster for her Richard III drama, Blood Royal.

But despite her hectic schedule, the consummate researcher isn’t ruling out the possibility of unearthing other historical secrets.

“I have got another two or three projects in my mind; I can’t talk about them but I would definitely like to do some more research,” says Philippa, adding with a hint of mischief: “You’ll just have to watch this space.”

And given her role in orchestrating one of the most bizarre and enthralling historical finds of recent years, I, for one, will definitely be watching.