IS THEIR NUMBER UP?
Joy turns to anguish in the new series of Kay Mellor’s The Syndicate when the winning lottery ticket is stolen...
Losing weight, learning an instrument, sword-fighting classes... Neil Morrissey’s done them all for roles, but dying his hair jet black has been as tough as anything. The Men Behaving Badly and Line Of Duty star plays a vain newsagent who’s obsessed with his pet dog in a new series of Kay Mellor’s lottery drama The Syndicate, and his new look took some getting used to.
‘My character Frank dyes his hair because he wants to look younger – it tells you a lot about the kind of flawed guy he is,’ says Neil. ‘I hated it. I’m used to being Mr Badger with hair that’s more grey.’
This is the fourth series of the drama, which looks at the repercussions when a syndicate of ordinary people win the lottery.
Striking it lucky this time are a group of kennel workers, but their ticket is stolen before they get a chance to claim their £27million jackpot. Each series has an entirely new cast, this time including Kay Mellor’s actress daughter Gaynor Faye as Frank’s long-suffering fiancée Cheryl, former Coronation Street star Kym Marsh as Donna, whose daughter is in the syndicate, and Strictly runnerup Joe Sugg as Sam, in his first TV acting role.
Frank knows the members of the syndicate – Sam’s girlfriend Roxy (Taj Atwal), Jake (Kieran Urquhart), Keeley (Katherine Rose Morley), Gemma (Liberty Hobbs) and Colette (Emily Head) – because he sends his beloved dog Duke, an Irish wolfhound, to their kennels, and they bought the ticket in his shop.
The win comes just as they have all been told their jobs are at risk as kennel owner Graham (Mark Benton) is selling up.
Kay got the idea of setting the series in a kennels after getting her own dog, a Shih-tzu called Happy who also makes an appearance. ‘We love dogs and I love seeing them on TV,’ she says. ‘So I started thinking, “What if the people in the syndicate were kennel workers?”.
This is the first time Kay has turned The Syndicate into a crime caper. ‘From the start I’ve been intrigued by what might happen if somebody took a lottery ticket that didn’t belong to them,’ she says. ‘But it took a long time to work it out – how would someone steal the ticket, and how do the people it belongs to get it back?’
Like many TV dramas The Syndicate was due to be filmed last March but the production was shut down because of the pandemic. ‘There’s no Covid in the series though, I think we’ve all had enough of it,’ says Kay. ‘But we have plenty of drama and dogs!’
The Syndicate, Tuesday, 9pm, BBC1.