Dead body found on set of BBC thriller
A corpse was found on the set of a BBC drama about a serial killer.
Filming on Rellik was halted after the grim find turned the set into a real crime scene.
Paterson Joseph, who plays psychiatrist Isaac Joseph in the show, said: “The crew arrived to film their own dead body and the pol ice told them they y weren’t able to, because they’d found a real dead body. It was bizarre, fact being stranger than fiction.”
The body f ind in east London’s Cambridge Heath Park was just one of manyy real-life events that eerily y mirrored the Rellik script.
Joseph, 53, added: “There were a lot of st range coincidences. Richard [Dormer], who plays our main character, getting impetigo and his face being covered in blotches and blemishes.
“He got the same reaction as his actual character, who’s been scarred in an acid attack. We found that odd.
“Then there was the acid attacks which happened at the same time as we were filming ours. It’s a strange show when it brings out these coincidences.”
Rellik – kil ler spel led backwards – was created and written by the team behind The Missing.
Joseph, who was in Casualty and Peep Show, added: “It’s fast paced, dark and quite bloody.
“It’s a mind- bender, it rea l ly does twist your thinking. Rellik is dark but with humour. It’s graveyard humour but there’s a light tone in there.” Gilbert McIlwrick, whose quiet and logical approach to crime saw him help solve dozens of murders at a time when Glasgow’s streets were at their meanest.”
McIlwrick was CID chief between 1951 and 1957 – a period when the transition from war to peacetime was still in full swing and created many opportunities for lawbreakers.
Andrew, 62, said: “Just a matter of days into the job and he was orchestrating the finale of the Stone of Destiny saga.
“The stone, which had been stolen from Westminster Abbey the December before by three Glasgow University students, was handed in to the Abbey of Arbroath. “McIlwrick was responsible for getting it out of police headquarters and back on the road to London – a difficult feat with all the press gathered outside.
“But the quick-thinking detective hoodwinked t he r e p or t e r s a nd photographers by sending the relic off in a n u na c compa n ied Jaguar which slipped away unnoticed.”
The dad of one added: “McIlwrick was also in charge of the search for the killer of four-year- old Betty Alexander, whose body was found in a secluded backyard near her home in Garnethill in October 1952.
“The hunt for her murderer became one of the most extensive ever carried out in Glasgow, with more than 3000 local people questioned and more than 800 fingerprints taken.
“The pol ice were overwhelmed with possible sightings and descriptions but, time after time, hopes were raised only to be dashed. In the end, the killer was never brought to justice.”
But it was during the summer of 1955 that McIlwrick was really put to the test. A heatwave ushered in a crime wave and, in seven days, a succession of five killings occurred in the city. Andrew,