Friend in the north
Two decades on from the classic British comedy Brassed Off, actor Stephen Tompkinson explains to why he’s stayed true to his roots with DCI Banks.
Stephen Tompkinson’s Yorkshire is so removed from London and the traditional overseas view of England that it might as well be a different country.
The 50-year-old actor is best known on Kiwi screens as DCI Alan Banks in the adaptations of Peter Robinson’s gritty northern English crime novels, and for his role of miner-turned-clown Phil alongside Ewan McGregor, Pete Postlethwaite and Tara Fitzgerald in the tug-at-your-heart-strings colliery band rom-com Brassed Off.
As DCI Banks heads into production for a fifth series and Brassed Off celebrates its 20th anniversary, Tompkinson said the appeal of playing familiar characters and locations (he was born just up the road from the North York Moors in Stockton-onTees) was to show the world an alternative – more realistic – view of the United Kingdom.
‘‘It’s nice that you’re away from the capital because sometimes people judge an entire country on its capital and I feel that London is an anomaly all of its own. So it’s nice to see other parts of county where attitudes are very different.’’
Of course, Kiwi viewers are used to seeing regular dales and moors on long-running soap Emmerdale and the ceaseless repeats of Last of the Summer Wine. But where DCI Banks excels is in its honest portrayal of police who are, as Tompkinson puts it, ‘‘extraordinary only in their ordinariness’’ and in crimes and lifestyles which ‘‘live in a very moral grey area’’ more understandable to viewers than ‘‘super-villains and heroes’’.
It’s very much a similar attitude to that which writer-director Mark Herman brought to 2006’s Brassed Off which told the story of a community fighting a losing battle against the closure of its local pit and is centred around a line spoken by Postlethwaite’s bandleader Danny: ‘‘I thought that music mattered. But does it bollocks – not compared to how people matter.’’
So, over the past 20 years since the end of the region’s mining industry, has the Yorkshire of Brassed Off changed at all to become the Yorkshire of DCI Banks?
‘‘I don’t think it has,’’ Tompkinson says. ‘‘You look at all the steel workers being laid off around Saltburn and it doesn’t feel sometimes anything’s changed at all. People are still having their industries dismantled by the very people who are supposed to be looking after them – which is their elected government.
‘‘I think people in the north do feel too far from Westminster and, although their lives are impacted by the decisions made down there, I think maybe in the future if Scotland gets another referendum and votes to split from England, then other referendums would start happening in cities in the north.‘‘
Tompkinson, whose range of roles has also included a go-getting tabloid hack in Drop the Dead Donkey ,a confused primetime priest in Ballykissangel and seven series as an expat vet running a South African game reserve in Wild at Heart, says his proudest acting work was on the set of Brassed Off: ‘‘You always hope but you never imagine that something you’ve done two decades ago would still have such an effect on an audience.’’
In the meantime, he’s in the middle of shooting for series five of DCI Banks – the sort of milestone which may fall short of David Jason’s 15 series in A Touch of Frost or John Thaw’s seven series and five specials over a 13-year reign as Inspector Morse, but which requires some deft handling to ensure plotlines and characters don’t become stale.
There’s also the danger – something the creators of Broadchurch know only too well – that storylines can become entwined in tangles of subplots.
This series, though, will inject new blood into the cast via Dr Who‘s Samuel Anderson and Shaun Dooley, who played Rickie Gillespie in Broadchurch, as well as introduce a series-long plot (promised to be the ‘‘grittiest yet’’) which will bridge the familiar format of three separate crimes divided between the six episodes.
‘‘So for the first time we have the chance to build a major storyline over six hours, which is always nice because it allows you to take you time a bit more,’’ Tompkinson says.
‘‘Although we try to bring new elements into every series, we still want to reward the loyal fan-base by giving them what they have enjoyed so far and then push the boundaries a bit more to show them something they haven’t seen.’’
But it’s unlikely that the actual character of DCI Alan Banks will depart much from the lugubrious, wartorn stoic who has trudged and solved his way through the first four series.
‘‘It’s funny because when we get reviewers trying to appraise the series, they’re not sure why it’s as successful as it is because Banks doesn’t have angles like Morse with his classical music and real ale – he just gets on with the job. The crimes can be mundane but it’s an absolutely necessary job,’’ Tompkinson says.
‘‘But I really respect him as a professional and I like the fact he’s so tied to his job. Peter [Robinson] writes in his books that Banks keeps a passage from the poet John Donne in his desk which says ‘any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind’ – it’s almost like he couldn’t do anything else.
‘‘He doesn’t deliberately bend the rules and stick something onto a suspect that he’s not 100 per cent sure of and he keeps the promises he makes to victims to see that justice is done.‘‘
So among his radio and stage plays and other screen work, is Tompkinson happy to stay true to a long-running series character like DCI Alan Banks? His answer betrays even more love for his own corner of northeast England.
‘‘Banks loves the solitude of the cottage on the moors where he goes to think – and that’s not a luxury given to metropolitan policeman so the setting works very well.
‘‘In the books, Alan Banks was in danger of burning out in London before Yorkshire found him and rescued him, and so it complements the way he works perfectly.
‘‘So, of course, I’m happy for the show and the storylines to run and run – it’s a nice little world that’s been created.’’ DCI Banks,
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