SILENT MOVIES!

Hugh Laurie’s a high-flying politician whose ruthless streak threatens to ruin him in David Hare’s new BBC thriller Roadkill

Film panel show There’s Something About Movies is back on Sky One this week without its usual studio audience… and host Alan Carr (pictured) prefers it that way. ‘I’m hoping they carry on without the audience, I just love it,’ he says. ‘I think the show’s got a really nice vibe to it now, warm and lovely.’

nn

Charming, popular, intelligent and handsome, Conservative transport minister Peter Laurence is making quick work of climbing Westminster’s greasy pole in Roadkill, David Hare’s cracking new four-part thriller on BBC1.

But the MP has secrets which could undermine his political ambitions. Can he keep his cupboard full of skeletons locked up or will they come tumbling out and leave his life in tatters?

Laurence, a family man with two daughters, is played by Hugh Laurie, one of a star-studded cast that includes Helen Mccrory as PM Dawn Ellison, Saskia Reeves as Laurence’s wife Helen, Borgen’s Sidse Babett Knudsen as his mistress Madeleine and Patricia Hodge as newspaper proprietor Lady Roche.

The drama begins with Laurence suing Lady Roche’s newspaper after it alleged he used his position as a government minister to make money. ‘Suing a newspaper for libel is not something politicians do generally, and the political establishment does not approve of them doing it,’ Hugh explains. ‘But Peter is a confident fellow and confident in his ability to talk himself out of a jam.’

That jam gradually becomes stickier, even though Laurence wins his libel action and avoids becoming roadkill, the word he uses to describe his fate had he lost in court. ‘The Prime