ITV to film new detective series Vera in North East

Jun 22 2010 by David Whetstone, The Journal

A MAJOR new television detective series is to be filmed in the North East this summer following the chance purchase of a book in an Oxfam shop.

ITV, whose decision to axe Wire In The Blood caused dismay in the region’s TV sector last year, has commissioned three feature-length episodes of a detective drama called Vera.

Starring award-winning actress Brenda Blethyn in the title role of Detective Vera Stanhope, they will be shot at various North East locations from a base at the former Swan Hunter shipyard in Wallsend, which is now owned by North Tyneside Council.

The three two-hour dramas will be shown early next year along with a pilot episode, made here last year, which impressed bosses at ITV.

The commission was hailed yesterday as more “wonderful news” for the North East broadcasting sector, but it is also thrilling for Whitley Bay author Ann Cleeves who wrote the novels on which the series will be based.

She said: “I did a short film for Border TV that I wrote but that was more like a competition. This is the first option on one of my novels that has been taken up so it’s all very exciting.”

She said ITV decided to pursue the project after one of its executives, Elaine Collins, bought one of the Vera Stanhope novels, The Crow Trap, in an Oxfam shop in London.

Ann, whose first novel was published in 1986 and who first introduced Vera Stanhope in The Crow Trap, published in 1999, said Vera’s progress to the small screen was “a really lovely story”.

The pilot episode, which will begin the series, also stars Gina McKee, who was born in Peterlee, as Julie Armstrong, the mother of a murder victim.

The commission means North East drama is to be back on the ITV and BBC networks.

After the axing of Wire in the Blood, which was also based on the novels of a North East writer, Val McDermid, there was an outcry.

Regional screen agency Northern Film & Media complained that the North East had all but vanished from the nation’s TV screens and warned that professionals in the sector would move away. Since then the BBC has started to make children’s series Tracy Beaker in the region and filming of the series Inspector George Gently was transferred from Northern Ireland to the North East.