Hare thriller marks BBC comeback 40 years on
POLICE dramas have been “done to death” by television, according to Sir David Hare, whose latest project happens to be a BBC thriller about a detective investigating a murder.
Collateral, starring Carey Mulligan, is Sir David’s first original television series and brings him back to the corporation 40 years after his work on Play For Today.
Mulligan plays a detective who investigates the fatal shooting of a pizza delivery man. But Sir David, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter and acclaimed playwright, said Collateral had little in common with other police shows and would not feature any clichés of the genre. The BBC is currently showing Hard Sun, a drama about two detectives who discover that the apocalypse is imminent, which comes hard on the heels of Luther, Happy Valley and Line of Duty.
Speaking at a BFI screening of Collateral, Sir David said: “I’m trying very hard not to do police procedural throughout. There are no computers. There are absolutely no whiteboards on which Pentel names are written with arrows going off them. There is absolutely none of all that.
“Because although I extravagantly admire Line of Duty – I think it’s fantastic – I do nevertheless feel that police procedural is a genre about which there is nothing to add. It has been done to death. I’m trying to make the police like people. They are completely normal people, and there isn’t any of that police attitudinising.” Sir David also specified “no flashing blue lights, but it finally became impossible”.
Collateral, which begins next month on BBC Two, delves into the world of illegal immigration, with a fictional removal centre based on the controversial Yarl’s Wood in Bedfordshire.