High crimes
On set with new BBC elite-crimefighters show, The Interceptor...
Keybridge House in Vauxhall, London, is regarded by both architects and local residents as one of the ugliest buildings in the capital: a grim, brutalist monolith that functioned as a BT telephone exchange in the ’80s but now looks like something out of Chernobyl, an abandoned relic of another age. For the purposes of new BBC One spy thriller The Interceptor, however, it’s perfect; its retro interiors, eerily preserved in all their garish glory, serving as a visually arresting base for top-secret operations. And that’s even without mentioning the (strongly denied) rumours that it was once used by MI6, who are based just down the road, for the very same reason...
Created by Tony Saint, whose previous credits include Sky One’s Strike Back, The Interceptor was inspired by the non-fiction book of the same name by Cameron Addicott, who details his time as one of the few highly experienced surveillance operatives to get called up to the secretive Alpha Projects unit: an elite group of undercover customs officers who hunted the UK’s most dangerous criminals by extraordinary means – starting with the interception and decoding of their phone calls.
As Saint says himself, though, Addicott’s account serves more as a place to start than straight-up source material, inspiring both The Interceptor’s top-secret surveillance team – renamed UNIT – and the “tonal approach” the show takes to crime.
“I had previously worked in the civil service before I became a writer,” he explains, “and I recognised that public-sector mentality, which is more gallows humour than some would imagine. And from the criminals – who are human, not just psychopathic comic-book characters – to UNIT, I wanted it to feel authentic and plausible, to ground the characters in reality without the show being morbid or downbeat. I think that way the perils of crime feels a little more immediate.”
Ash and grab
One such character is leading man Ash (O.T. Fagbenle), a reckless cop whose dream of catching the biggest fish in the criminal underworld – instead of just his usual small fry – comes a step closer when he’s recruited to UNIT for his streetwise expertise. But his uncompromising methods and hunger for results, informed by a childhood with a drugdealing father, are the price to pay.
“He’s a man of contradictions,” says Fagbenle, who’s been shooting in the windowless corridors of this ’80s mausoleum for the past few weeks now. “He’s grown up in a really tough neighbourhood, but his profession is keeping the law. He’s tight with
his family but he keeps what he does secret from them. He’s obsessive about catching criminals, but he breaks the rules.”
Such rule-breaking is the reason why Fagbenle’s face is covered in (fake) cuts and bruises today: clearly the part of Ash is a physically demanding, actioncentric one. So much so, in fact, that the original Ash – actor David Gyasi (last seen as Romilly in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar) – had to leave the production after injuring his leg on set.
“It was an honour to take over from David,” says Fagbenle, who got the part just after finishing work on HBO ’s US sitcom Looking. “He’s been really supportive. My 11-year-old self celebrates every day. I mean, I kicked a guy through a window just the other day! And there’s this huge chase sequence through Waterloo Station, a gunfight in Camden, some amazing car chases, this big fight scene in a vat of black liquid... Our stunt co-ordinator is a genius of violence!”
Everyday strife
Bumps and bruises are par for the course, it seems. “Every single episode there’s some cool stunt; every week I get a knock on my knees or on my shoulder,” reveals Fagbenle. “True story: they started adding white to my beard and after six months of living in Ash’s shoes, I’m actually growing white hairs! But that’s true of Ash too. Each episode is interesting in itself, as we go on these crime capers taking down bad guys, but overall there’s this eight-episode story arc that takes its toll on Ash. He goes to the limits to catch the ultimate bad guy.”
That bad guy would be Roach, played by the formidable presence that is veteran thesp Trevor Eve (Alice’s dad). And it’s his criminal network – featuring guest villains such as Dennis Pennis/ Game Of Thrones star Paul Kaye – that the espionage team must gradually uncover over the show’s eight hours, exposing UNIT to London’s full patchwork of crime. “They’re sort of chasing a ghost,” explains Saint. “The idea of that character [ Roach] is that they ‘know someone’s out there’, but they have to start at the bottom, and try to work their way to the top, which means they stumble across a lot of criminality. In a way I kind of wanted to change the way that crime has just become ‘murder’.
“I grew up with Kojak and Starsky & Hutch, and there were all types of crime: extortion, robbery, blackmail. And I think The Interceptor is more of a crime show in that sense: everyday crime, everyday people. There are deaths, there are murders, but they’re a symptom of a larger world of crime that we’re investigating in the show, one that is never far away from you wherever you are – which is quite worrying. But quite exciting at the same time...”
ETA | june The Interceptor begins airing on BBC One this month.