The Spy Who - The Spy Who Duped Hitler | Making a Musical out of Mincemeat | 4

Episode Date: April 15, 2025

David Cumming, writer, actor, composer and originator of Operation Mincemeat: The Musical, transformed one of WWII’s most surreal tales—a corpse planted with fake intelligence to mislead the Nazis—into an all-singing, all-dancing West End sensation. Our host, Charlie Higson speaks to David about finding musical comedy in this unlikely wartime story, and balancing humour with the operation's darker truths.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge full seasons of The Spy Who early and ad free on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. From Wondery, I'm Charlie Higson, spy novelist, actor, comedian, and this is The Spy Who. Thank you for joining us for our final episode of The Spy Who Duked Hitler. 30th April 1943 was the date that possibly the greatest war deception since the Trojan Horse came into being. The war is undecided. Europe is under control of the Nazis, but the Allies have a trick up their sleeve.

In Room 13 of the Naval Intelligence Division, the plan for Operation Mincemeat was underway. Churchill wants to attack Sicily, but he needs the Nazis to look the other way. Cue a dead body dressed as a Marine, given a fictitious backstory packed with misleading intelligence. If you haven't already, go and listen to episodes 1-3 of this series to find out exactly

how this mission played out, and how this audacious plan shifted the momentum of the war decisively in the Allies' favour. When Operation Mincemeat first came to my attention I wasn't thinking you know what this would make a great comedy infused musical but my guest today thought very differently. In this episode I'm going to speak to David Cumming one of the originators of Operation Mincemeat the musical. Its run has been extended 12 times and it's recently moved to Broadway and it won best new musical at the 2024 Olivier Awards.

I caught up with David just as he was packing his things to go to New York to begin the Broadway run. I caught up with David just as he was packing his things to go to New York to begin the Broadway run. I caught up with David just as he was packing his things to go to New York to begin the Broadway run. I caught up with David just as he was packing his things to go to New York to begin the Broadway run. I caught up with David just as he was packing his things to go to New York to begin the Broadway run. I caught up with David just as he was packing his things to go to New York to begin the Broadway run. I'm Mike Bubbins.

I'm Ellis James. And I'm Steph Guerrero. And we're convinced that our podcast, The Socially Distanced Sports Bar, is going to be your new favourite comedy podcast with just a little bit of sport thrown in. You don't have to love sport, like sport or even know anything about sport to listen. Because nobody has conversations which stay on topic. and it's the same on our podcast. We might start off talking about ice hockey but end up discussing, I don't know, 1980s British sitcom Alo Alo instead.

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So welcome David, thank you so much for joining me on The Spy Who, particularly as you're very busy. At the time of recording this, you are rehearsing, getting ready to go over to Broadway. You're rehearsing in London. And when this goes out, the show will already be on. Yes, I'll be dancing and singing my way, tapping my way around New York, hopefully to applause, but we'll, the future we'll find, we'll tell us. I mean, how scary is that at the moment?

Uh, yeah, it's pretty daunting. We're literally flying in about 48 hours But sure like arriving at the home of musicals with a British written musical about a British story We're yet to see whether there is the taste for that. We hope so, but we'll find out. Well, I'm sure Some Americans remember the war Yeah, yeah, I'm sure so David you're an actor, a writer, a composer, a lyricist, a recording artist, you make people laugh, you make people cry. I mean, is there anything I've missed there?

I'm a very good son, my mother says, so that's all so nice. Yeah, no, I'm one of... I'm Jack of all trades, master of possibly none, who knows? In relation to the show, I will start by saying that I did not make the show alone. I am one of four writers of the show. So it's myself, Natasha Hodgson, Sylvie Roberts, and Felix Hagen. And together we are collectively known as a writing group called Spitlip. And then in the show itself, my lead character is Charles Chumley.

And then I play a host of other smaller characters you meet throughout the show. Have you ever added up exactly how many? Yeah, I think I play 13 in total. Oh, no, actually on Broadway I play 14. We've just added an extra character that I play. And then initially we self-directed and self-choreographed the show whilst we were inside of it. Now I went to see the show and I really enjoyed it. And I'm fascinated about how it started

and how you got from where it started to where you are now. When was it first an idea? We got together with the express aim of making a musical that would prove to the money men that we could make big commercial musicals. And then Natasha, my fellow co-writer, she was on a holiday and was chatting to her family bemoaning how difficult it is to be an artist and how inspiration eludes you at all turns.

And her brother simply took out his earpods and was like, actually, I'm listening to a podcast right now that should be a musical. She was like, what do you know? You're a vet. Why don't you go pat a horse and I'll be an artist? But then she listened, sent it to us. Our immediate response was, this is about World War II. We're not going to write a musical about World War II.

The story is so out there and audacious and bonkers and true. And then the fact that it actually came off, it was a real eye-opening moment of, oh, there's another side to this war that we are never taught. And that's kind of where the impetus came from. And that was back in 2017. And then it took us two years from finding that idea to the very first performance in 2019. Which aspect of it did you latch onto? I think the initial hook for us was the kind of farcical, spy caper element of it. This crazy adventure that these kind of ragtag group of office

workers really instigate and then this body goes on this international adventure and how deeply British and kind of strange and stiffer for lit men getting away with it vibe. And then the more we dug into the story and more we wrote around it, it became about ultimately the story of five unsung heroes or five lesser known people who wouldn't normally be remembered in a war, including, very importantly, the women who are unsung and their contribution and that actually it isn't just the men who history remembers that matter, it's in fact everyone, including at the very end, Glinda Michael himself.

Well, I thought that worked so well because you've got that dysfunctional group of people within MO5 who would not thrive in any other situation, but they had exactly what was needed to make this bizarre plot work. To pull it off, to push it through, to quite brazenly ignore some deeply strange moral questions around what they're up to. Ignore a lot of flaws, but there was also an element of, we're really taking quite a big risk here. And I, for better or worse, I think a certain class of established, privileged British man is exactly the kind of person to kind of push that level of, well, as long as we say it's going to happen, it's going to happen.

Yes, and just to see it as a practical problem that needs solving and not worry too much about the fact that there's a corpse involved. Exactly, yeah, we could do this and never stop to think, should we do this? I think there's a lot of parallels in this story with Alan Turing and Bletchley Park and the sort of, the behind the scenes men and women who are so vital to winning their ball. And then also because they're kind of cast gender blind, so that Natasha is playing Montague, and so it doesn't really look like you'd expect.

You're getting certain power dynamics performed by actors you wouldn't expect to be in charge of each other. The Montagues, even Montague's direct family came, sat on the front two rows, there was 12 of them, including his actual children, who were like in their 80s maybe? Like 80s. And Audibly, at one point, his son, Audibly was like, which one is he? And his sister had to be like, so that one, he was like, well the woman? Like really loudly, we were like, yes, sorry. But when we walked out of the theater afterwards,

Natasha walked out, she was terrified, of course. She was like, what? We don't portray him in a bad light, but he's not necessarily the hero of the story. They turned around and one of them shouted, granddad! And ran over and gave her a big hug. And since then, we've been in contact with them.

They've given her Monty's actual hat to take with her to Broadway. They really backed the show. They've said that they feel it really sums up his humor and his vibe, that he'd really like this version of events. It's the kind of show he'd be like, that's how you tell this story. Which is a wonderful thing to be told as a writer, that you've summed up someone's essence. It's interesting watching it how quickly you forget or don't think about the genders of

the different parts, because I guess part of it is because people are playing so many different... Yeah, this became something really fun in the part of Monty being played by a woman. It just wouldn't be quite as fun watching a man stomp around the stage being entitled. When you watch a woman do it, there's another level of, ah, it's a learned behavior and that therefore becomes funny. Because you're like, this idiot, what's he doing? And then Hester is played by someone who doesn't identify as a woman,

which adds, you rarely get to see non-female bodies standing in kind of sadness and vulnerability for that long a time on stage. Usually they think they then move to violence, either against themselves or against someone or anger. Whereas this person just stands there and is like, I'm deeply, deeply, deeply, deeply sad. And at that point, were you thinking let's try and make it a traditional music, a musical, what was your kind of approach?

We knew it was going to be a comedy, because that's, we are comedy writers. Just finding what's the funny angle on this, and someone, one person going away, writing an idea. We were very clear early on from the get-go, in fact, that we didn't want the show to feel like it was 1943. So the design was all very bright colors. We were wearing costumes that were of the period, but our hair is slightly kind of modern or queer, you might say. And then the music, we were very clear on being it, it's not just going to be 1940s, like... ...trumpets.

I mean, it's got everything you want in musical. The songs are, they tell the story, they show us the characters. They're very catchy. Our rule was if it's not pushing the plot forward or it's not getting a laugh, then what's it doing in the story? And there is so much of this story. If you listen to any podcast or read, watch the film or read any of Montague's books or any history books about it,

there's just far too much to get into one show. And we tried to do it in the first version. And one song ended up being 26 minutes long. And we were like, that's insane. That's an act. That's not a song. And so we had to just start culling, which is a good position to be in. A lot of other musicals perhaps suffer

from not having enough plot. So we were in a good position in that sense. But if you're thinking about the genre of it, are you thinking, oh, the genre is musical or the genre is spy genre? It's always been firmly a musical. I think we've now found the correct balance of heart alongside laughs. Your main character is Charles Chumley. I was going to ask you which is your favorite character in the show, but would you say Charles Chumley?

I mean, Charles is adorable and he's great and he is the brains behind the mission. It would be churlish not to say him. I think our most fun creation is Spillsbury, who was a real person, but is an amalgamation in our show of Bentley Spillsbury, who was a real person, but is an amalgamation in our show of Bentley Purchase, who was the real coroner, and Spillsbury, who was a pathologist. But we've amalgamated him into one man, because initially we had these two corpse guys and everyone, you could see the audience be like,

you've just, we've just met a corpse man, we don't need to meet another corpse man. So we made him a kind of all singing, dancing, bejeweled, kind of Rocky Horror show coroner man who's really kind of turned on by corpses, dare I say. He's just a great creation. But obviously to play Charles is a gift. What a genius man. Very strange man also. But he's very fun and is a fish out of water in many different ways.

Yeah. I mean, you know, he's the classic sort of beta male. Yes, absolutely. Who has this idea. Who has this idea, but not the wherewithal or the confidence to push it through, which is where Ewan Montague comes in, who has all the confidence, all the wherewithal. He wants to be the man who won the war, and ultimately he kind of was.

And it seemed, from what we can tell, that Charles wasn't interested in any of that kind of side of it. And he was happy to just step back. And when Monty was obsessed with getting his book out and obsessed with getting his film made, he was like, sure, don't use my name, call me George. Presumably, because he was still working for MI5. He was like, I don't want anyone to know I'm a spy, dude.

This is literally meant to be secret. So yeah, it's an interesting interplay that they have, because they are completely chalk and cheese, and yet together they really do. They work on stage, but also they work very well as a team, pushing this through. Do you remember, well, either the first song you wrote, or the first song you wrote where you thought,

okay, we've got it, we know what we're doing now. So early on, we wrote two songs for a scratch night in the Lowry in Manchester, which is when you just like take anything you have and just shove it in front of an audience. Mainly as a way to force ourselves to write. And those songs were one called Trout Ticklers, which was a sort of James Bond Shirley Bassey Diamonds Are Forever-esque kind of number where Admiral Godfrey comes in and says to these men, we need to trick the Nazis, we need to send out lures, which is literally what happened via a Trout memo that Ian Fleming actually wrote that Chumlee then found later

in the Second World War and was like, hey, this has got some good ideas in it. One was Operation Meant to Meant. And that song was great and silly. We did have a great night. It was the chorus of Trout Ticklers beat Hitlers, which I still think is very good. But the annals of history shall not remember that. The other song, however, was one called God That's Brilliant. And it was the different characters pitching all their crazy ideas.

We'd read all these bits of history about all the crazy schemes that they were getting up to in World War II, just many different hairbrained schemes, and we were like, okay, this is a great chance to just have some comedy and a fun kind of patter song with a jazzy vibe. So we wrote that within the first couple of months of starting to make the show? It's a comedy, but there are also some very moving bits in it, and inevitably, because of the subject matter, you know, you have to go into the darker side of the fact that it revolves around finding his corpse.

But then I guess with the daft character of the... Spillsbury, yeah. Spillsbury, yeah. Did you do that as a way to soften that side of it or did you just think that would be fun? I think it's probably a bit of both. I think we thought that would be fun just to be like oh it's funny if it's a singing dancing coroner because you don't expect them to be. But I think we were keen that you know this is real life, it's a war and you're fighting a horrible

enemy that isn't just like people arguing over things it's a deep evil that you're fighting. And it would be remiss of us to be flippant about any of this. Our focus may be on comedy, but we're not laughing at war. But at moments of the show, such as in Dear Bill, or just for tonight when Monty and Chumlee are talking and he's like, look, I know it's difficult, but the only way to get through some things is to kind of go put a brave face on and have a night out. You can't always wallow in the sadness. The juxtaposition between the men in the submarine, they're out having a drink, and then you're with the guys in the submarine

who are quite literally risking their lives, almost ended up getting fired upon by a German U-boat, and then sending this body off. And we really harshly juxtapose those two things together in a hope to show the kind of double-sided nature of war, and that we as writers know the truth behind that. And then, of course, we have to deal at some point with the Nazis. And so early on, we were like,

we are not going to have them in scenes, we're not gonna have them talking, because once you start doing that weirdly, you kind of start to humanize them. And so the way we do it was to... It's the most modern sounding song in the show. It comes out of absolutely nowhere. It's kind of almost techno-y and we were looking at the kind of allure of the right wing and

what we came upon was like, you know, that kind of the simplicity of love told by a boy band of just, come with me, girl, take off your clothes, it's all going to be fine, there's no repercussions, just do what I say. Exposing their ideology for how thin it is, but also how terrifyingly alluring it can be. Because if the world was that simple, wouldn't life be great? But it's not. It's as real as a boy band's love is.

So David, one of the things you've done in the show is to sort of give a starring role to Hester Leggett, this woman who was in charge of the secretaries in MI5. But it is believed that she probably wrote these amazing love letters. Yes. So these love letters were part of this concept called wallet litter. If you were to drop dead right now, you'd probably have something on you, a wallet full of bits of your life. And if you're a soldier, you may well likely have letters from a loved one.

And so they decided to write these letters for Bill from Pam. And they were passed around the office. They all tried to write them and they all came off as saccharine, from what we can understand. And then it seems that Hester Legger had a chance to write these. And she was well known as a bit of a battle ax, a bit, kind of, very stiff of a lip, ruled with an iron fist with all the girls. Matron.

Yeah, exactly. But somehow was able to write these quite touching, beautiful letters. And so we thought we would then give her this song, which comes out of nowhere, where she's tasked with writing it, and you watch her, the Dear Bill song, and she's the... The show stopper. Yeah. And our song has a bit from it, which is, why do we meet in the middle of a war, what a silly thing for anyone to do, what a gorgeous bit, gorgeous couplet.

She's tasked with writing it and you watch her start to kind of dictate writing it and then fall into a memory of a lost loved one. And why did we meet in the middle of a war? What a silly thing for anyone to do. And I'm trying my best to write everything down, to fill in the gaps so that when you're around, it'll be like you've never been gone. As if you'd been here all along. I mean, it's unexpected. You don't expect a comedy musical to have a six-minute song that is an unsurprising tearjerker from a character who you were told has no heart.

And then you're like, oh, actually, this person does have a heart, because of all, everyone has a heart. After Natasha sung that song, the Dear Bill song, and there was pure silence, and we were like, oh my God, what have we done? This is so embarrassing. And then they were like wiping their eyes and clapping. We were like, oh, right. Okay, great. And yeah, we don't know much about that character herself, but it seemed that because of that song, the audience really warmed to her.

The dear Bill letter, which is layers and layers underneath. And the implication is that Hester did have a great love affair. Yeah. And so we didn't know much about that character, and so we thought, okay, if she's a bit older, maybe if we make her old enough that she's already been through the First World War, she's part of a generation of women who went through presumably an extremely traumatic event, which is almost all the men of their generation died. Except she was only 38.

Except she was only 38, which we didn't know at the time because there was no, we didn't know who she was. Well in the film, it's played by Penelope Wilters. Yeah, brilliant actress. Not 38. She's in her seventies. She is, she is. I think up until very recently, no one knew the exact age of Hester. And so we wondered, because she did write the real letter in real life. And we were just wondering, I remember thinking, saying,

you know, what if the reason she could do this was because she used to write this kind of stuff. And that, you know, behind the stiff upper lip or behind any person could well be a heart that's in pain. And there's a whole musical there if you want to delve into it. And also the sense of that love is kind of, you know, in times of war, love is put on hold that a lot of people have to put things to one side. You put all, yeah, everyone's love is put on hold during a war.

And to have a story that's, and now they have the lovely love bit, you're like, sure, people are dying, guys, you know, maybe focus on that. And I understand that fans of your show managed to track down Hester Leggott's family. I mean, we tried to, but really all there was to go on was a name, Hester Leggott. And actually, frankly, we didn't down tools and try and go to the archives. I think we just didn't realize that you could do that. And also there was 101 other things to do, not least of all write a musical. But once the show kind of grew and the fan base started to grow and then become more

kind of actively involved in messaging us or wanting to know more about the show. And the fan base who affectionately call themselves the mincefluences, they took it upon themselves to try and find out more information about all the characters in the show. And we said, hey, we don't know anything about Hester. Like, she's just a woman called Hester Leggett, E.T. And then a group of the minnsfluences start finding out that, oh, actually, some of us drove up the country to go to the National Archives

to find out some more information. We could. Some of them were historians. And it turns out that a common historian trick is to try different spellings of names, because quite easily they could be misspelled in records. And no one could really find Hester Legat, but Hester Legat, a few were found, they started matching dates around the war, and they, off their own back, with encouragement from us,

but certainly not because it was anything to do with us, literally located this woman in history and contacted MI5 and got a letter from MI5 being like, yes, Hester Legat did work at this time in that building, in that section, and probably more than likely worked on Operation Mint Me. They then contacted the families. The family didn't know anything about this. And I think a book is coming out about how they've done this.

And they now have access to her diaries. I mean, why would she like this? They have access to her diaries and her love letters to people. And so, you know, it's really brought a kind of weird real life fact to have come from our fictional show. It's bizarre. And then the show, the building itself in the West End, we put a plaque up. In the Fortune Theater. In the Fortune Theater, which quotes a little bit of the show and then thanks all the team that found Hester. Because in one of the songs, the two women talk about,

because they are women, they will never get their flowers and they will never get plaques. And so we felt it was time to right that wrong, as it were. How important was it to you to stick to the truth or did the sort of the energy of the musical and what was required to make that work, did that start to take over and was there a point where you said, well, it has to work as a show and if we have to change things it's not the end of the world? Yeah, I think initially we were, that's when we started to get into the sense of... And people would come up just being like,

this is really exciting, what is this? Other people would come up and say, you can't lie about history like this. You can't pretend that people did this. We were like, okay, well they did. So not much we could say about that. You can't change facts. We toyed with this idea of a truth alarm or a truth siren.

A terrible idea. But of like truth alarm or a truth siren, a terrible idea. But of like trying to let the audience know like this did actually happen. Like they did have war magicians. They did use inflatable tanks. They did like it's all true. So we were very keen to get truth in there. But over time our tired writers brains were like, but the beat needs to go this way and the truth goes this way. So we massaged some time elements to make things fit a bit more satisfyingly for a theatrical

arc. And, but what was really key for us was that we didn't lie about the character, the main five characters, and we tried to capture their essence as much as we could. So, or at least build an essence that we thought was right. Because we didn't feel we could bring ourselves to be like, and then Monty and Gene have a salacious affair. It was like, well, there's no proof of that. They wrote each other love letters as Bill and Pam. That is fact. It's definitely not fact. Weird sexual cosplay.

Yeah, exactly. Which, you know, sure, it's the war. What's not necessarily true is that they then went on and consummated that as two, actually, two real people. Not that we ever thought anyone would ever watch the musical beyond these five weeks, but we still didn't want to do that disservice. But as time has gone on, you realize that actually there's some things that you as writers really care about or think matter. And actually, an audience are just like, I could not care less about the truth right now. I just want to feel happy, sad, joy, anger, and that's what they care about. And so there's certain elements such as, Major William Martin is the fake identity that they create for that person.

He is from the Royal Navy. And he is not the Air Force, but in our show we refer to him as a pilot, because you need to explain quite succinctly in lyric form that he's going to crash in the sea. And any other way of doing that, you start having to list who people are in the army. And people are like, why is this song existing? I'm so bored. But we still get letters to this day of people being like, you've got it wrong. And we're like, well, we had to make that choice in order for succinctness. And it is a constant play with when you're adapting history and that sense of, is there

a greater truth that I'm servicing by actually telling a white lie here? Amazing. So the Mimflu... the Mincefluences sound like quite a formidable bunch. I mean, do they do that whole theatrical thing of turning up in character? Sure, they absolutely do. We didn't know that they were going to do that. Do they sing along or is that banned? That's banned. That's banned. You didn't do any they were going to do that. Do they sing along or is that banned? That's banned. That's banned.

You didn't do any sing along questions? We have very strong feelings in different feelings as to how we feel now and until all of us are aligned we're going to say no singing along. We might at one point have a sing along, but it's too much at this stage. But a dress up, fine. And there was, I think it was, we found out online that there was something called Operation Interesting Man. They give themselves their own operations to do.

Which isn't the first time with 70 people. The next time, I think it was 250 or 270 people came in dress up from, as like not just the main characters, someone dressed like a jug of sangria. I'm going to say, no one's seen the show but Brian, the lung from the draw in Sits Billsbury's office. Like really out there, costumes that nobody, like weird references that nobody would get. And they're just having a whale of a time. And what's really nice is that the show, for them, has become like a place for a new community. That seems to be, it's quite a queer community and also quite a newer, diverse community,

because I think they see that reflected in the show, in the presentation of the show, and the presentation of the characters that Chimney reads quite kind of... He's different, but brilliant with it. And there's a kind of a joy to that. Everyone is kind of praised, or everyone is given a space to be part of that team in their own best way, and they don't have to conform to something else. And they've found each other and now created this really wonderful,

loving, caring group of people who now is now transatlantic. So at the heart of the original Operation Vince Me, and to a certain extent with your musical, is this figure of Glendur Michael, this homeless man whose body was dressed up as William Martin. Sometimes they're thinking, well, this is a real man, this is a corpse, and sometimes they're thinking, well, we've just real man, this is a corpse. And sometimes they're thinking, well, we just got to do it to make the operation work. And then right at the end, you do talk about him and it's very moving. As is the scene, which again, you touched on before with the sailors out at sea, quite somber, they've realized that their special package that they're launching into the ocean

is a person, a dead person. I think really put us very much on the front line of what it's like for the people who were fighting the war. And the fact that, well, there's a dead body at the core of it. So as you say, Glendor is this kind of, it's kind of a ghost in the show that is in the background. You hear that this body has been taken. A couple of characters do ask what's his name, and a few of the other characters say it's not important. Or Monty later on says he doesn't matter.

And so you see these sailors, these submariners, they said a hymn and then said a prayer as they put them up to sea. They treated him with respect. In a way that I wouldn't say that Monty and Jimmy didn't have respect for him, but they would, I think they had to see him as a tool and they had to do a relatively nasty thing. They had to like defrost him so he could fit into things and take pictures of him because they had to. And so I think there's a slight disconnect there that they must have had to have as to

who this person really was. Yeah, and I guess they would deliberately do that, not try and find out too much about him. Yeah, exactly. They have to treat him as he is part of this plot. And I think he became Bill, right, in their heads. He's this being that they've created that can be whatever they want. He juries out as to whether, I'm pretty sure, they didn't actually ask the family.

I think he, Ewan Montague claimed when he wrote the redacted, official government version of what happened in this in his book, he was like, oh, we definitely went and asked the family. Michael, they didn't have any family to us. Well, no, yeah, no, his, well, his, yeah, his, it's really difficult as writers to work out how to put that person in your show. But now, he thankfully was remembered because Monty had been stealing files. We did find out who this person actually was.

And then there was many petitions 50 years afterwards to get his name, his real name, put on the headstone in Huelva. Because obviously when he was buried as Major William Martin, which is the fake person. So it's Glyndor Michael who served as Major William Martin. These arcs that we've created don't matter as much as everyone realizing behind all of this is a real human. And there he is now on Broadway. But yeah, and now people know him and he becomes an allegory for how everyone matters, like

at all levels. That even someone who in their life mattered so little that they slipped through the nets of society can in death be the very thing that props up the entire system that didn't care about them. It's kind of mind blowing for that to be true. And we sing about if it's down, it's down together. If it's up, it's up as one. As a way of being, you know, everyone from the top to the bottom matters.

So yeah, it does feel good to have righted that wrong, I guess. It works very well. And do you think you would have made a good agent? I mean, rather than an agent in the field, maybe someone like Chumlee doing that backstage. Because I mean, it's really interesting that so many great English writers of the 20th century, at some point, worked for Secret Service, whether it's Somerset Maughan, Graham Green, John Acare in Fleming, and that sort of creative side and using different approaches. I certainly think like being in a writer's room

or with a group of fellow writers is a little bit like, you bounce off each other's ideas, you finesse things. Whether or not I would be subtle enough to be an agent, I'm not sure. I think maybe I could... I know that Noel Coward was sent out because he had access to lots of rooms where lots of ambassadors were. He was well known as being funny and good with lyrics, but not particularly quick. They used that to allow him to sit next to people

and hear state secrets. I was like, he's not gonna tell anyone, he's just this entertainer man. So I think I could get away with that. So finally, David, what do you hope audiences take away from your version of this story? We want to send people out happier than they came in, and hopefully they spread that happiness.

But also with a sense of that anything is kind of possible, that five weirdos can change the course of Nazism, or the encroachment of Nazism on this world. And I hope it puts a fire in the bellies of an audience who are unfortunately facing a present where these things have become more and more real. And I hope it gives them a sense of one, laughter through the dark times, and two, that actually this fight has been fought before.

And that it can be done with humor and with great thinking and camaraderie. And if we all pull together, it's not just the people that help to get things through it's everyone pulling together as a community that actually makes change and that makes good real. Thank you David that was that was really interesting and well obviously good luck. Thank you. I'm gonna need it. It really is a brilliant show and all spy fans should make a point of seeing it. Well, in fact, you know, if you just like a good entertaining night out, it's funny, it's moving, it's incredibly well put together.

You can catch the show in London's Fortune Theatre, and it's just opened on Broadway, which is where you can see David perform as Charles Chumley and many other characters. And I do love stories that look at the unsung heroes. Well, they are now sung heroes in this musical, but the people behind the scenes who are working hard and often completely anonymously to make everything work. And to win a war, you need all types of people. You need tough, brave young people to go out there

and be on the front line, but you need also weird, interesting, different people back home, coming up with ideas, coming up with solutions, solving problems all the time. And of course, those are the people who normally don't feature in stories. Thank you for listening, and do join us for our next episode of The Spy Who, hosted by Indra Varma.

Next time, we open the file on Hardy Amis, the spy who dressed the queen. The fashion designer lives in two worlds, one of elegance where he dresses Hollywood icons, sports heroes and royalty, and another in the shadows where he orchestrates assassinations in Nazi-occupied Belgium. But his latest operation threatens to come undone at the seams. Follow the Spy Who now wherever you listen to podcasts. From Wondery, this is the final episode in our series, The Spy Who Duped Hitler. This episode of The Spy Who is hosted by me, Charlie Higson.

Our show is produced by Vespucci for Wondery, with story consultancy by Yellow Ant. For Vespucci, our senior producers are Ashley Clevery and Philippa Gearing. Our sound designer is Ivor Manley. Rachel Byrne is the supervising producer. Music supervisor is Scott Velasquez for Frisson Sync. Executive producers for Vespucci are Johnny Galvin and Daniel Turcombe. The executive producer for Yellow Am Ant is Tristan Donovan. Our senior producer for Wondery is Theodora Louloudis and our senior managing

producer for Wondery is Rachel Sibley. Executive producers for Wondery are Estelle Doyle, Chris Bourne and Marshall Nui. Music Laundry Music