It’s in his blood
Aug 16 2008 by David Whetstone, The Journal
David Whetstone gets uncomfortably close to the new series of Wire in the Blood.
TWENTY feet from a dismembered body the size of a small car is not an especially cosy place to be, even if you are seated in cosseted luxury.
But this is big screen entertainment Val McDermid-style. Or rather, it is small screen entertainment on a big screen at the Tyneside Cinema – a preview showing of the latest series of Wire in the Blood. And I am in the third row from the front.
Robson Green, who plays clinical psychologist Dr Tony Hill in the series, and executive producer Sandra Jobling, are holding court.
Their pride in the Wire in the Blood franchise is immeasurable and justifiable. It’s no mean feat these days to get a major drama series commissioned for ITV1, particularly one set and actually shot in the North East.
Sandra, who used to be Robson’s bank manager before his soaring TV fame lured her into the world of film production, asserts: “The North East is a forgotten region in the UK. We are the only major drama production company in the region and it has taken us 12 years to get to where we are today.
“It would have been very easy for us to take the easy route and go to the south but we were determined to stay here and invest in the people here.”
Not only is Coastal Productions based here, but Val McDermid, the best selling crime novelist, lives in Alnmouth, Northumberland.
The Wire in the Blood TV series isn’t written by Val, but she created the main characters and endorses the Coastal Productions enterprise. She has a new book of her own out on September 1, A Darker Domain.
Robson is as perky as ever. Responding to a quip by Michael Chaplin, who is on the board of Northern Film & Media and wrote a play Robson appeared in years ago at Live Theatre, he says: “I love being a housewives’ favourite. I think it’s a marvellous tribute and it’s nice that it’s for a series that isn’t intellectually barren.”
He tells us his interpretation of Tony Hill is partly inspired by a real-life clinical psychologist he met in Cambridge. “He was clumsy and slightly buffoon-like, and carried his things in a polythene bag and travelled to work on a bike.”
In one important aspect, Robson’s Hill differs from Val McDermid’s. “In the book,” he says, “he has a sexual dysfunction; he’s impotent. I thought, I can’t have that.”
Not that there’s a great deal of love interest in Unnatural Vices, the first of the four two-part films to be shown this autumn.
There is some sort of latent flickering – an understanding rather than a mutual attraction – between Hill and Detective Inspector Alex Fielding (played by Simone Lahbib), but lust is more of a motivating force. There’s a Hannibal Lecter-style serial killer on the loose. Limbless bodies in cheap suitcases are recovered from a tarn. There’s a no-questions-asked club where bondage and sado-masochism are the main delicacies on the menu.
Robson gets a little shirty with a woman in the audience who confesses that Unnatural Vices is “hard to watch”, snapping: “It’s about a serial killer but it’s just storytelling. It’s up to you guys to tell your children of seven not to watch it.”
But it is valid to ask ourselves why we want to watch torture and gore, even if it is leavened with humour and good writing. No blood flows in Unnatural Vices, not like in King Lear when Gloucester has his eyes gouged out, but it very definitely walks on the dark side of human nature.
One murder (implied rather than shown) takes place at a spot where I regularly walk the dog. Ah, the fun of North East location-spotting!
Glancing up at himself on the big screen, Robson remarks that, at 43, he is starting to remind himself of his dad.
He can look back with some pride. The youth theatre group he and Sandra helped to set up at Live Theatre, giving North East youngsters a route into the business, is celebrating its 10th anniversary this weekend.
Coastal Productions, meanwhile, is looking onwards and upwards. It is working on another three-part drama series, Place of Execution, adapted from a Val McDermid book, shot in the North East and starring Juliet Stevenson and Newcastle-born Greg Wise, and which is scheduled for ITV1 in September. And Sandra Jobling has dreams of making a feature film.
Robson adds another string to his bow as co-executive producer on Place of Execution.
And recently he added yet another, travelling the world for his first TV documentary, Extreme Fishing, for Five.
He has also made a Clash of the Santas Christmas special for ITV1 with co-star Mark Benton. It involves a Santa convention in Lithuania and I imagine it won’t involve any horrible deaths.
