YEAR friendship
It’s a sweet tradition that began when they were ten and Edward Heath was PM. Now Keith and Martin’s photobooth shots tell how, together, they’ve overcome life’s trials Snapshots of a 50 YEAR friendship
THERE’S something rather comical about seeing two 60-year-old men in shorts trying to squeeze into a teeny passport photobooth on Skegness station platform.
Knees creak, seagulls squawk and the little blue curtain flaps as Martin Dowle and Keith Laughton giggle and wiggle and jostle to get purchase on the single grey swivel stool inside.
‘Budge over. I can’t get my bum on!’ ‘Ohhh, my knees!’ Martin, a semi-retired paramedic and long-distance cycling fanatic, is on the right. Keith, a probation officer and grandfather of six, on the left (as we look at them). Exactly as they have been for the past halfcentury (other than absent-minded blips when they were 40 and 55).
Indeed, ever since they were boys they have met religiously in supermarkets and stations all over the country to celebrate landmark birthdays ending in five or zero.
‘I’d even fly back from wherever I was abroad,’ says Martin.
For their previous photo, aged 55, they used the booth on the platform at Lincoln station. And you’d think, after so long, they’d have got over any shyness about their sweet little tradition. But perhaps not.
Keith laughs: ‘We got there at about 8pm one night and the platform was heaving. Four legs inside and the curtain flapping about isn’t a great look. We had to wait and wait, but we got the photo.’
Which, of course, they duly added to their collection. Not that this story is really about the photos — brilliantly evocative though they are, marching through the decades — fresh-faced monochrome to wrinkly colour.
No, it’s about male friendship in an era when so many middle-aged men struggle to maintain close friends. And the pictures are merely a physical reminder of a wonderfully enriching relationship between two boyhood pals that has somehow endured everything: from bad hair to beards, one girlfriend dated by both, grubby flat shares, huge geographical distances, weddings, a divorce (Martin), children and grandchildren (Keith), ill health (Martin), a spattering of cycling accidents (Martin), a lot of beer (both) and yet, by their account, not one row.
‘What would we even argue about?’ says Keith looking a bit stumped. ‘We’re there for each other — always will be.’
It all started in the sleepy village of Bardney, near Lincoln, in 1972. Edward Heath was Prime Minister, Donny Osmond was in the charts and best mates Martin and Keith were ten-year-old choir boys and bell-ringers for the local church.
‘There was nothing else to do and we got 50p for a wedding!’ says Keith. So, awash with their bellringing booty, they hopped on the bus to Lincoln on their first solo trip. Popping into Woollies to browse the pick ’n’ mix, they spotted a photobooth. ‘It was only 20p back then, so we did it for a laugh,’ says Keith.
And there they are — grinning bright teeth with shiny clean hair, celebrating newfound independence. ‘We look very sweet!’
Five years later, by then 15 and having swapped the bell-ringing for home brew, cycling and chasing girls, they found themselves back in Woollies, this time browsing records — Dylan, Bowie, Jackson Browne.
They spotted the booth again — was it more than just coincidence? Hopping in, they made a pact: they’d do it every five years for the rest of their lives.
It’s the sort of promise lots of us make when we’re young and full of zesty optimism. But, of course, it’s one few of us manage to keep. We drift apart. But not this pair.
Not when they were 11 years old
and Keith went to the local grammar and Martin to the secondary modern. Not when Martin moved first to South Africa, then London, then Margate and Brighton, while Keith stayed in Bardney.
And not even when Keith got off with Martin’s ex-girlfriend. (‘To be fair, I didn’t know about that until today!’ says Martin.)
As Keith found himself surrounded by a rapidly-expanding family and Martin became consumed by his stressful job, still they always kept in touch — by phone, postcard, good old-fashioned letter, and they have never, once, missed a birthday.
Sometimes they’d meet up to let their hair down at Glastonbury. Or go to Slade and John Cooper Clarke gigs. And then there was Martin’s ‘rather hectic’ 40th birthday party in Margate when they were both feeling so clammy and confused that they dashed off for their five-year snapshot and, afterwards, realised they’d sat the wrong way round in the photobooth.
‘We were a bit frazzled around the edges. It was a very good party,’ says Keith.
MeANWhILe, their lives marched on. Martin has been a paramedic since 1986. he got married and divorced, took up long-distance mountain biking and now works part time.
Keith has worked as a probation officer since 1986. he married wife Julie 37 years ago and they have three children.
‘Of course, we have other friends which shift and change. But Martin’s a constant,’ says Keith.
‘Though there was that period when he disappeared off the face of the earth for a while,’ he continues. ‘I’d written and written and I was getting really annoyed and worried. I felt helpless.’
In the end, it was Julie who said, ‘Let’s just book a hotel, get in the car and drive down to Brighton [where Martin lived at the time].’
‘he was in a terrible place,’ says Keith quietly.
‘I was suffering from depression — the job, the shifts,’ admits Martin. ‘But him coming down changed everything. It somehow kicked me out of it.’
Because unlike so many middleaged men who find it hard to discuss anything other than beer and sport, this pair really talk.
Yes, they joke and tease. But they also confide in each other, sometimes cry and never put up a proud front. ‘There’s no competition — we’re on each other’s side,’ says Keith. ‘Though he does go on at me about my drinking and smoking!’ So has there really never been any jealousy between them?
‘I’d like his six-pack,’ jokes Keith. ‘You can see from our physiques who gave up cycling aged 17 and who carried it on.’
And Martin? ‘I’d probably have liked to have had a family and Keith is a shining example of how to have a family. he’s such a good dad.’
But otherwise, they’re both more than content with their lot.
‘Our lives haven’t been super exciting. But most lives aren’t,’ says Keith. ‘We’re just two normal guys who’ve had good lives and stayed friends and we know we’re very, very lucky.’
To mark the big 6-0, they’d dreamt of travelling to Rwanda to see the gorillas and have their photo taken in the jungle.
‘It didn’t quite happen — we didn’t get ourselves organised in time,’ says Keith. So, instead, this week Martin travelled up from Brighton to sunny Skegness. ‘Which is almost as nice,’ says Keith. ‘And I bought him a lovely toy gorilla instead.’
There is one downside to cataloguing your life in photographs.
‘Of course, it’s poignant. every time we think, oh s***, another five years have gone by!’ says Keith ‘When you get to our age, you try not to think about it, but we obviously don’t have another 50 years of photos ahead.’
They have, however, planned for the worst.
‘Whoever’s left will take the final set of photos with a cardboard cutout of the other,’ says Martin. ‘And that will be the end.’
But for now, they’re giggling and jostling in the booth and exclaiming at the cost — ‘eight pounds! It used to be 20 pence!’ — just like they’re ten years old again.
PICTURE the scene: our hero, Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez, is gazing moodily out to sea, the pretty Shetland town of Lerwick behind him. Flinging his arm out towards the ocean he declares passionately: ‘We’ve got the sky, and the sea, and razorbills, and kittiwakes. What more do you want?’ His sassy teenage daughter regards him witheringly. ‘Top Shop.’
It is lines like this that have made BBC drama Shetland, starring Douglas Henshall, one of the most successful crime series of recent years. Forget Morse, Bergerac or the gang from Line of Duty, these days, it’s Jimmy Perez who frequently gets called out as one of TV’s most loved detectives. So much so that one fan said on Twitter this week: ‘Shetland is the best Scottish crime drama since Taggart. Maybe better.’
But devoted fans best look away now. Never mind a murder, there’s been a casting announcement. While a new series of Shetland will air starting next month, it will be Henshall’s last. He has, according to the BBC, ‘made the decision to depart Shetland to explore other acting opportunities’.
Whether that is strictly true remains unclear. Henshall appeared blindsided by the announcement, made this week, tweeting: ‘I didn’t know that this was coming out today but it’s true.’ He later posted saying: ‘For those that are interested I’ll explain my reasons for leaving later.’
Gosh. But whatever the truth behind Henshall’s departure, it wasn’t long before the tributes were flooding in on social media.
‘I will be gutted to see you go Douglas,’ wrote one fan. ‘For me, you ARE Shetland and it won’t be the same without you.’
Others seemed convinced that without Henshall, there was no Shetland (the TV show that is, the islands, we suspect, will just about survive).
‘Perhaps it would be a good idea now for the producers of the show to let it come to a natural end,’ wrote one.
That however, does not appear to be the plan. According to the makers of the show, a new series without Henshall in the lead role will start filming next year.
‘We will miss him enormously but he leaves the show in rude health and we’re extremely excited about the plans we have for bringing more of this much loved drama to audiences far and wide,’ said Gaynor Holmes, executive producer for BBC Drama.
They will be tough Timberlands to fill. It is almost ten years since Henshall first fixed his eyes on the far horizon on the show’s initial series, aired in 2013. In some ways he was an unlikely sex symbol – grumpy and unpredictable, with a fine line in sturdy and sensible outdoor gear (his ever-present blue pea coat has become so popular it now has its own Twitter account).
Then there’s his satisfyingly complicated private life, including a teenage stepdaughter he co-parents with the wayward Duncan, played by Mark Bonnar, and a long lost, still mourned late wife who conveniently stops him from getting too deeply involved in any romantic entanglements.
Where many past TV detectives have fallen just on the wrong side of hard-bitten, Perez has always had emotional depth. He is gently spoken, doesn’t have a drink problem and, best of all, is really rather attractive.
‘He’s a policeman who is kind of defined through his work. I think he’s somebody who is compassionate and empathetic and kind, but with very little regard for himself because I don’t think he ever really got over losing his wife, and he hides in his work,’ Henshall once said.
He is also, much like his predecessor Taggart, surprisingly funny. In one exasperated scene he says to Duncan: ‘Watching you live your life is like watching Scotland try to qualify for the World Cup. It’s frustrating.
Embarrassing. At times excruciating. But ultimately, I live in hope that you’ll get there in the end.’
In the last series Henshall’s character dealt with the death of his mother and his father’s dementia, while his trusty second in command Tosh seemingly sailed towards domestic bliss, having revealed that she is pregnant.
Can Perez ever find happiness? Or are the show makers going to go the whole hog and bump him off? One clue may lie in the fact that the last series and the one which will air shortly were actually shot back to back in Shetland last year.
In a statement put out by the BBC, Henshall said: ‘After series five of Shetland, David Kane and I decided we wanted to do two more series to complete the story of Perez. So series six and seven were commissioned together to give us time to wrap up Perez’s story to a satisfactory end.’
The new series apparently sees the team investigate the mysterious disappearance of a vulnerable young man. However, given that at the end of the last series we saw Perez being arrested on suspicion of covering up an assisted suicide, all may not be as clear cut as it seems.
Henshall himself, 56, has already moved on. He is in Barcelona, filming a new Netflix series, Palomino, made by the same production company as
‘An unlikely sex symbol, grumpy and unpredictable’ ‘Body count similar to that of inner city Manchester’
the one behind The Crown. The sort of actor who has never been out of work yet never truly hit the big time, there is little doubt Shetland gave Henshall the sort of high profile that had hitherto eluded him in a career that has seen him appear in shows as varied as Dennis Potter’s Lipstick on Your Collar, Outlander and, inevitably, The Bill.
Now married to Croatian playwright Tena Stivicic. with whom he has a five-year-old daughter, they live a quiet life in Glasgow, having quit London several years ago.
Things haven’t always been plain sailing however. In 2005, the same year as he played Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in TV movie The Strange Case of Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle, he was declared bankrupt. ‘S*** happens,’ he said at the time, adding: ‘What you see on the outside and read about isn’t always what’s going on underneath.’
It’s a phrase that could easily be used to describe the TV depiction of the Shetland Isles which, thanks to the show, would now appear to have a body count similar to that of inner city Manchester. Indeed, one wag totted up the murder rate after three series had aired and concluded that the number of fictional killings meant the islands had a murder rate of 68.2 per 100,000 people, making it the 11th most deadly place in the world.
The notion that the peaceful and – in real life, normally murder-free – islands could become a murder capital came from crime writer Ann Cleeves, on whose books the series is based. Cleeves, who also wrote Vera, another successful TV adaptation now on its tenth series on ITV, fell in love with Shetland in the 1970s, when a chance meeting in a London pub while she was working as a childcare officer led to her taking a job as assistant cook at the bird observatory on Fair Isle, the tiny, jumperheavy island off the coast of Shetland that makes Lerwick look like a bustling metropolis.
Not only did the opportunity lead to her finding inspiration for her books
(Perez hails from the Fair Isle, his Spanish name a nod to the tale of a Spanish Armada ship which was wrecked off the island, leading to some sailors staying and marrying local women), it’s also where she met her husband Tim, a keen birdwatcher.
‘There were lots of ravens, very black against the snow. So, because I’m a writer, I thought, “What if there were blood as well? And would ravens eat a body?” I checked with Tim, who said they would,’ she once gruesomely revealed.
‘Initially it was going to be a short story, and my editor said it would stretch credibility if I wrote more than one novel.
‘But after the good reviews and winning the Dagger [award for crime fiction], we decided we could stretch to a series.’
There are eight Cleeves Shetland books in all (intriguingly, in the final instalment, we leave Perez for the final time having found a semblance of personal happiness), and while the early TV series loosely followed the books, in more recent years the TV show has veered off on its own narrative, including writing in the character of feisty sidekick Tosh, and making Perez’s much younger stepdaughter Cassie into a mouthy, occasionally troublesome teen.
Cleeves, much like Henshall, has become a celebrity in Shetland, albeit one the locals know how to take to task. As she once wryly remarked: ‘I’m somebody who comes and kills people in their backyards but they’re still very helpful and tell me when I get things wrong.’
The books and TV series have also created something of a side industry in Shetland itself. The islands saw visitor numbers rocket by 43 per cent since 2006, coincithe the year when Cleeves’s first book, Raven Black, was published, and another 53 per cent since 2013, when the series first aired.
A 2019 survey by VisitScotland meanwhile, found that 38 per cent of leisure travellers to the islands mentioned television programmes as a reason for visiting. Of those, 87 per cent cited Shetland.
Today, the tourism board promotes three ‘Perez trails’, selfguided tours of filming locations, as well as a walking tour of Lerwick entitled Perez’s town. There are also tour guides all too keen to take fans out to see where action happens, and given that Shetland airs across Europe and, perhaps crucially, in the US, find that they are often from further afield than Glasgow.
One Danish couple were so inspired by the scenery in the show that they travelled to Shetland to marry on the Eshaness cliffs, while VisitScotland says it has heard reports of Americans coming to the islands with the sole purpose of gaining a role as an extra.
Laurie Goodlad, who wrote the tour guides for the tourism board, said the impact went deeper than a quick holiday. ‘Ten years ago, if you said that you’re from Shetdentally land, people would have no idea where that was.’
Cleeves – who has also moved on from the series, having finished her final Shetland novel in 2018 – is delighted. ‘I’m proud that Jimmy Perez has helped to drive a minitourist boom,’ she said.
‘I hope that I may have encouraged a few people to come to the Shetland Islands.’
The question now, however, is whether a new lead can drum up the same sort of love and affection not just for the TV series, but the place itself.
Could the plucky Tosh be promoted to lead character? Might the occasionally chaotic Sandy, played by Steven Robertson, have his day in the sun?
Or will a new lead appear on the islands, keen to erase the memory of Jimmy Perez? Only one thing remains certain: there will, without doubt, be another murder.
‘I’m somebody who comes and kills people in their backyards’