Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
DOUBLE TROUBLE!
Crime drama fans are in for a treat this week as ITV’s Prime Suspect prequel launches and the final series of Broadchurch begins. Here we meet the casts of both shows...
Crime drama fans will be spoiled this week as the Prime Suspect prequel and the last ever Broadchurch (right) begin. We meet the casts of both
Most people would agree this is a golden age for British TV, and that our crime dramas are the jewels in the crown. We lead the world when it comes to creating enigmatic detectives and giving them intriguing cases to solve, from the brilliant maverick Sherlock Holmes to the understated Cassie Stuart and Sunny Khan in Unforgotten, the hilariously awkward detectives in Death In Paradise to the gritty, deadly serious plots in Line Of Duty.
And this week fans of crime drama will be well and truly spoiled as two of our best-loved police shows return – one taking us right back to the beginning, the other bowing out with a third and final series. Prime Suspect, the show that made a star of Helen Mirren and paved the way for today’s femaleled police dramas, is back with a prequel series charting the early days of WPC Jane Tennison in the 1970s, and showing how events made her into the woman she became. And Broadchurch, the 2013 whodunnit that had half the country tuning in for its gripping final episode, returns for a third and final series with a brand new case.
The original Prime Suspect, written by Lynda La Plante, ran from 1991 to 2006 and won eight BAFTAs, seven Emmys and countless other awards. It made a star of Helen Mirren as the flawed but determined Jane Tennison, and now we’ll find out what shaped her. ‘It’s exciting to take on such a well-loved series,’ says the new show’s producer Rhonda Smith. ‘But it’s quite a different story; this is about a young, naive girl thrust into a very different world.’
The new two-part series, Prime Suspect 1973, is based on Lynda’s 2015 book Tennison, about Jane’s first days in the Metropolitan Police. Lynda says she only began to think about Tennison’s origins when she was giving a talk in Sheffield and a member of the audience asked what had turned Jane into such a cold and ambitious woman. ‘I had no background for her,’ she recalls. ‘I thought, “Where did she come from and, more importantly, how did she get to be that person who dealt with all the discrimination and put-downs?”’
Over seven series of the original show, we saw Jane slowly climb up the ranks of the Met despite the sexism she faced. Unafraid to tackle tough subjects, she investigated everything from police brutality to paedophilia and genocide. Her dedication to her job, however, had a disastrous impact on her private life, and she ended up turning to alcohol as a crutch.
The new series sees Stefanie Mar- tini playing the 22-year- old Jane, who’s tackling her first murder case in 1973, the year women were officially incorporated into the police force. Until then they were part of a separate unit and even in this show they work on a different floor to the men. Finding a young actress to step into Helen Mirren’s shoes took months of auditions. ‘Stefanie excited us from the first time we saw her,’ says Rhonda. ‘She had amazing presence and you could see the determination in her.’
Ironically, Stefanie’s first TV role was in Endeavour, the hugely successful prequel to Inspector Morse. That show proved more than any other that there’s an appetite for seeing the formative years of our popular detectives. A pretty, middle- class, Somerset girl with a husky voice and Bambi eyes, Stefanie left RADA just over a year ago but has already appeared in last year’s Doctor Thorne with Tom Hollander and US show Emerald City, a reimagining of The Wizard Of Oz. She says she tried not to think too hard about the pressure of taking on such an iconic character as Jane Tennison. ‘ Of course I’d be crazy if I wasn’t terrified,’ she laughs. ‘It’s a lot of pressure and I know a lot of people have a very strong relationship with the original series. But that’s great; it’s a challenge. It’s a unique situation and probably something that will never happen to me again, and that makes it exhilarating.’
A long-time fan of Helen Mirren, Stefanie was aware of the original series and its reputation when she auditioned, but only sat down to watch the box sets once she’d been given the role. ‘I had to see our series as a separate thing to the original,’ she says. ‘Otherwise I’d have had a mental breakdown! It was great to see Helen Mirren’s performance and where Jane ended up. But with the script I was given she’s a completely different person, at a very different point in her life. She’s very inexper ienced, she’s young, naive and c l ums y. Sh e doesn’t real ly know what she’s doing, but she’s eager.’ Dame Helen has welcomed the series, saying, ‘It’s a lovely idea to go back. It’s good for young women to see how the world used to be for women who wanted to be in the police.’
The Jane Tennison we meet in episode one is a middle-class girl from west London who’s not surprisingly a little out of her depth. She becomes part of a murder team investigating the brutal death of a young girl after interrupting her superiors while serving tea and impressing them with her thoughts. We see her in her first days as a trainee, experiencing her first post-mortem, speaking to a family whose loved one has died and trying to coax information out of a group of prostitutes. The whole time she’s eager to please and keen to learn, a different fish to the cold, ruthless character Jane becomes. ‘When we meet her she’s fresh-faced and wideeyed,’ says Stefanie. ‘But everything that happens in this series happens
‘She’s young, naive and clumsy, but she’s eager’
around her. She’s taking it all in and that makes her harder as a person.
‘She has a very strong moral compass, but that’s something that gets challenged. How practical it is to see things as black and white is something that’s challenged by the police force. She learns that doing the right thing might not be the most efficient thing, or even the best thing for the case.’
With its colour palette of browns and oranges, lots of flared trousers and grimy London streets, the show has a nostalgic feel. But for Stefanie, 26, one of its most fascinating aspects was seeing just how women were treated then. In one of the first scenes a colleague leers at Jane’s bottom, to the amusement of his peers. Later on she’s seen having to take on domestic duties like clearing away the tea mugs because she’s a woman.
‘I spoke to a woman who was a WPC at that time and she said it was all about laughing it off and being clever,’ says Stefanie. ‘It was interesting because I did one scene in which Jane and Kath Morgan, the other WPC played by Jessica Gunning, have both been told they have to mop up some vomit. They roll their eyes and say, “Oh God, here we go again, they might as well make us wear maids’ outfits.” But those comments were taken out of the show because they were deemed inappropriate – at that time sexism was just accepted, not questioned.’
The bulk of the cast are young men, brought up in a very different era, and they seem equally surprised at how prevalent sexism was just 40 years ago. Inbetweeners actor Blake Harrison plays Jane’s superior DS Spencer Gibbs, but that doesn’t stop him being the one to leer at her backside. ‘Our police advisor on the show, Callum Sutherland, and his wife were both in the force in the 70s and they said it’s
just how things were,’ says Blake. ‘At one point Jane is washing up her plate in the kitchen and someone comes along with his plate and says, “Be a love” and expects her to wash it.
‘ It doesn’t matter how talented WPCs were, how much promise they showed – women were treated as second-class officers at that time.’
Policing was also very different 40 years ago. There were no plastic gloves at crime scenes, DNA evidence wasn’t col lected and police brutality was al ive and well. ‘Gibbs has got a bit of a short fuse and he’s not afraid to get heavy- handed with whoever he comes across,’ says Blake.
The character is his first major serious TV role since finding fame as dopey Neil in school sitcom The Inbetweeners, and Blake was so keen to take it he left his honeymoon early, after being offered the job two days before jetting to Mauritius to marry girlfriend Kerry Ann Lynch. He says despite ‘looking like one of those men on the 118 phone line adverts’ with his 1970s moustache, he hopes audiences will take him seriously. ‘At drama school I never thought I’d be a comedy actor – I normally played baddies – so it’s nice to get stuck into something like this. It’s very different.’
While the cast list includes veteran
Alun Armstrong and Unforgotten’s Ruth Sheen, who play members of a crime family, it also introduces a new young team. The man who shows Jane Tennison the ropes is chiseljawed DI Len Bradfield, played by Australian actor Sam Reid. There’s a definite spark between the two characters. ‘I couldn’t tell you about any romance,’ grins Stefanie. ‘But he does take her under his wing.’
The show has been bought by US channel PBS, which will screen it in the ‘Masterpiece’ segment once filled by Downton Abbey and Sherlock. If it does well, people will clamour for more but there are no definite plans yet. ‘I don’t know what will happen,’ admits Rhonda Smith. ‘We must wait and see.’
Lynda La Plante was originally part of the ITV production team but left early on, saying only that she was ‘sad’ not to be part of it. Neither she nor ITV have commented on any falling-out but as Lynda’s only written two prequel books so far, fans will have to hope they kiss and make up. Stefanie certainly feels there’s more to come. ‘I’d love to carry on telling the story,’ she says. ‘I feel there’s so much more we could learn about this character.’
‘In one of the first scenes a colleague leers at her bottom’
Prime Suspect 1973 starts on Thursday at 9pm on ITV.