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Terror in the tunnels
A rogue surgeon, a botched robbery, a mother out for revenge – new thriller Temple imagines a netherworld in the abandoned underground stations beneath London
Every day, millions of workers and tourists walk unknowingly over a labyrinth of secret tunnels carved beneath London’s hectic streets. When the Victorians built the underground train system, many stations and tunnels ended up being neither used nor filled in, and they still exist. It’s this fascinating hidden world that forms the basis for Temple, a thrilling new Sky One drama named after a Tube station that has derelict tunnels and bunkers running off it.
Written by Irish playwright Mark O’Rowe, the eight- par t series stars Kingsman actor Mark Strong as surgeon Daniel, who uses one such bunker as a secret operating theatre to treat people who don’t want to seek help officially. ‘He treats people who want to stay off the grid, such as criminals and immigrants who don’t have any papers,’ explains Mark.
The illegal business is the brain child of one of Daniel’s patients, Lee ( Daniel Mays), an underground worker who has access to these areas and his own reasons for wanting to live away from prying eyes. Lee is obsessed with ‘prepping’ – learning how to live in a self-sufficient way to survive anything from an economic crash to nuclear war or a zombie attack. ‘Prepping is feeling the world is going to end at any given moment and you should be prepared,’ says Daniel. ‘ This is Lee’s dream world. He grows his own food down there and stockpiles all the supplies he needs. He comes out with all this stuff about chaos theory. He’s completely bonkers but he’s funny. I’ve loved playing this role.’
Lee first approaches Daniel to ask him to carry out a hernia operation on a friend who doesn’t want to go through the conventional channels, but Daniel refuses. Later on, Daniel’s medical researcher wife Beth (Sherlock’s Catherine McCormack) becomes seriously ill and is refused funding to develop her own cure. In his bid to save her, Daniel needs some privacy and the conversation with Lee pops back into his head.
‘Daniel has no idea Beth is ill until she collaps
es and he discovers she’s been hiding her illness from him,’ says Mark. ‘He goes to extreme lengths to try to save her, all of which are done with the best of intentions and out of love, but they lead him to incredible places that he wouldn’t usually expect to be inhabiting.
‘He gets into an unholy alliance with Lee, who has the keys to a bunch of underground tunnels. In order to use the area, he agrees to Lee’s plan to treat patients secretly and they develop this strange working relationship. They’re an odd couple: two guys from two very different stratas of society who are thrown together. You follow them through a series of trials and tribulations as they deal with this thing they’ve created. Daniel gets into some tight corners, but everything he does is for love.’
Gradually more people learn about the underground world, and a strange‘ family’ begins to exist – Daniel, Lee and a series of patients with big personal it ies. ‘They are a fantastic collection of exotic characters,’ says Mark. ‘ The fun is watching Daniel cope with being taken out of his world and placed somewhere he never dreamed he’d be.’
Among the members of the collective is Jamie, a family friend of Lee’s who is brought to the hospital with gunshot wounds after he’s involved in a botched armed robbery. When he learns he accidentally shot dead a policeman, Jamie knows he can’t leave the hospital as there’s a huge manhunt for him. ‘Jamie has a huge heart,’ says newcomer Tobi King Bakare, who plays him. ‘He’s living a laidback life, then when his girlfriend gets pregnant he panics and decides he needs to get some money. But he messes up and gets shot. The police are chasing him so he becomes totally trapped in the bunker.’
But it turns out that it’s not just the police who are hunting him. The rest of the gang were caught and are now in prison – and the mother of one of them, Mercy (Luther’s Wunmi Mosaku) is also searching for Jamie, hellbent on revenge, with her exlover Keith (Line Of
‘Daniel treats people who want to stay off the grid’ MARK STRONG
Duty’s Craig Parkinson). That spells trouble not just for Jamie but for everyone who is trying to help protect him, including his friend Lee.
‘Daniel Mays is my former flatmate and one of my best mates,’ laughs Craig. ‘I won’t give away what happens, but if Mark writes, “You’ve got to hunt down a character played by one of your best pals and do despicable things to him”, that’s a lot of fun. I love Danny to bits but my God, it was fun to torture him.
‘Doing this was one of the happiest times I’ve had since Line Of Duty. It’s very exciting. I love that Keith isn’t driven by hate. Mercy is the love of his life and he’s motivated by that, but he knows he’ll have to do some terrible things. And it’s different for me to play a part like that. It asks questions of the audience – what would you do, do you have empathy for this person?’
Another part of the ‘ family’ is Anna (Game Of Thrones actress Carice van Houten), a colleague of Beth’s. She had an affair with Daniel but they ended it when he learned Beth was gravely ill. But it’s clear they still have chemistry.
‘Daniel and Anna find it hard to push those feelings away,’ says Carice. ‘When Daniel asks Anna for help in curing Beth, she agrees. She says yes for Daniel, but also for her friend, and it’s a professional dream.
‘From there on it gets t r icky again because she can’t let Daniel go, but he’s trying to keep his wife al ive and it’s a bit of a dilemma. She becomes part of that little family, that parallel universe in the bunker. She might be happier down there than in the real world. The people in the bunker are all running away from something.’
The show is based on Scandi-noir drama Valkyrien and was developed by Our Friends In The North actor Mark with his wife, executive producer Liza Marshall, after they binge-watched the series. Mark admits, though, that Temple is hard to define by genre: it has elements of a road-trip movie, a thriller, a love story and a black comedy. Danny says it’s like a Coen Brothers movie ‘with elements of Breaking Bad’.
It’s a long way from a medical drama, although it necessar i ly includes some surgical scenes. To prepare for those, Mark went to Guy’s Hospital in London to observe lung surgery. ‘ I didn’t know how I’d respond – whether I’d find it interesting or faint at the sight of blood,’ he says. ‘But it was fascinating, most of all because all those surgery scenes you see on TV are nothing like reality. So when I came to do it on screen, I knew the general feel. Ours is more rough and ready – like a field hospital in a war zone – but I knew where to put my hands and where to hold the scalpel, and pretty much how to go about taking out an organ then clamp off the arteries and veins.’
The team behind Temple also took their research seriously when it came to locations. There are over 30 closed Tube stations in London, and Liza and set designer David Roger visited some of them before filming began in order to work on the set design. They also filmed in some of the tunnels. ‘The Tube network was built by entrepreneurs and the lines were owned by different people,’ explains Liza. ‘Often they dug lift shafts and tunnels and ended up not using them. There are hidden rivers and catacombs all over London, it’s crazy. It’s hard to film down there. You have to carry all the equipment down because there are no lifts – or toilets! But we only filmed a few scenes in those tunnels. The “bunker” is a set inside an old Sugar Puffs factory.’
David’s inspirations when he
‘Those in the bunker are all running from something’ CARICE VAN HOUTEN
designed the round, high- ceilinged main operating room included Dr Frankenstein’s laboratory. Daniel Mays, who worked with Steven Spielberg on The Adventures Of Tintin and appeared in Star Wars movie Rogue One, says it’s one of the best sets he’s ever worked on. ‘ Not only its scale, but because the design of it is so theatrical. The location stuff has been great too. We’ve been to Paddington station, and Aldwych underground station, which is one of the unused ones. It’s so dusty down there but very atmospheric.’
So, next time you’re walking through the streets of London, take a moment to think about the miles of tunnels beneath your feet – and wonder what might be going on down there.
Temple, Friday, 9pm, Sky One.