Seven-day TV guide
(BBC2, 9pm, tonight) IF you’re an actor and you hear that a book you love is being turned into a TV series, then you might think you’d jump at the chance to star in an adaptation of it.
However, David Morrissey admits to having some misgivings when he heard about screenwriter Tony Grisoni’s latest project.
The actor, whose credits include The Missing, The Walking Dead and the recent Britannia, says: “’I have known Tony Grisoni for a long time, he was the writer of Red Riding which I was in a number of years ago, and about two years ago he told me he was writing an adaptation of China Mieville’s book The City and the City.
“I knew the book and I thought it was great that he was doing it but I was slightly taken aback because the book is an amazing story, it is a wonderful world that China creates, but I thought ‘how are you going to bring that to the screen?’”
It’s easy to see why he thought something might get lost in translation. The book has been described as ‘weird fiction’ – a type of science-fiction which is essentially set in our own world, but with a twist that makes you see things anew. As the title suggests, in The City and The City, a lot of that weirdness comes from the setting.
Morrissey explains: “The concept is strange, it is a detective story told in this city, which is actually two cities that share the same footprint, but there are very strict regulations about the fact that one city cannot see the other city’s populace, they can’t look there, they can’t acknowledge them or interact with them and that creates all sorts of strange rules.”
Luckily, Grisoni and director Tom Shankland convinced Morrissey the world could be recreated. The actors says: “Tom talked me through his ideas and concepts and his design board and photographs... I think he is a wonderful director and one I have wanted to work with for a long time and so I said yes. It was a real leap of faith but I loved the way Tom and his team have created these two worlds.”
Now curious viewers – and fellow fans of Mieville’s book – will get a chance to see how this works on screen as the four-part series begins.
Morrissey stars as Inspector Tyador Borlu, a police officer with the Extreme Crime Squad in the city of Beszel.
He’s called in when the body of a young woman is found, and quickly notices similarities between the murder and another, older case.
But the investigation is made more complicated by the fact that the young woman’s body was found at the Bulkya Docks – an area known for its close overlap with Ul Qoma, the city which the residents of Bes?el are trained from childhood not to see.
Commissar Gadlem (Ron Cook) thinks this is a case for Breach, the secret police who ruthlessly patrol all cross-border crime, but can Borlu let it go?