Combine a bit of Columbo and a dash of Morse and you get pullover-wearing detective Dodds
WE LIVE in a crowded market place of detective dramas. From Marple to Morse, Luther to Line Of Duty, they all compete for our attention, and mostly on a Sunday night. But do we have enough?
Bafta-winning actor Jasonwatkins doesn’t believe so.the star of everything from Palace drama The Crown to supermarket sitcom Trollied tells me: “When the Bafta happened, they asked me what I wanted to do. I said I wanted to re-invent coppers like Columbo...”
The result is ITV’S Mcdonald & Dodds, debuting tonight. Jason – who won his Best Actor gong in 2015 for fact-based The Lost Honour Of Christopher Jefferies about an ex-teacher wrongly suspected of murder – adds: “I love all the characters I play but there’s something about doing one over a long period of time which is very appealing.and I really love playing detective Dodds.
“There’s not only Columbo in this character.there’s a little bit of Morse too.”
Inspector Frost? “No, I don’t see that.”
It didn’t happen immediately: “It took a few years to come by.a lot of things came my way in the meantime. But if this works out it will give me half a year to do this, and half to do other things. But you never know what is going to happen.”
With relative newcomer Tala
Gouveia as his senior officer, DCI Mcdonald, the series has both wit and intrigue.
I’m chatting with both of them and there’s obvious a chemistry that translates well to the screen.
Launching a new detective partnership on a fussy audience is no small thing.this one is set in Bath which Jason says is “captured filmically” which indeed it is, with sweeping shots of the Georgian architecture, much in the way that Morse and Endeavour showed off the splendour of Oxford.
Tala – best known as Adam’s barista crush in Cold Feet – “jumped” at the chance of playing opposite Jason. “The characters flew off the page and the relationship between the two impressed me,” she says.
“Mcdonald was brilliant, unapologetic and quite sassy. She’s from South London, grew up there, and suddenly gets this opportunity to move up the ladder.
“I actually spoke to a woman who was a detective in the Met and she said she got her first job because she applied in Lewisham. No one else wanted the job because of the estate, but she said, ‘These are my people!’ So moving is the way to get a promotion.”
The series of feature-length crime
‘It’s a clash between two worlds with these characters’