Crime pays

Stuart Martin talks to Janet Christie about his new TV series Miss Scarlet and the Duke

Stuart Martin spends most of his life shooting TV dramas and films across Europe, dashing home at weekends to catch up with his wife and young son. Coronavirus has stopped all that for now, and the star of new series Miss Scarlet and the Duke tells Janet Christie about the Victorian-set detective story, finding the upside of life in lockdown and how the world might just change for the better after all of this. Portrait by Robert Harper

Like the rest of us, actor Stuart Martin is on lockdown at home, life put on hold as the virus changes our world beyond recognition. Like so many, his livelihood has been hit as the cameras stop rolling, but he’s busy counting his blessings as he looks out of his bedroom window onto the empty streets around his East London family home.

“Hopefully we’ll all be all right. And within the situation the great thing is what people do: think about what we really need, about actual necessities.

“I think we will come out of it, changed for the better,” says the 34-year-old from Ayr.

Martin is best known for Babylon, the Channel 4 cop comedy-drama series, Jamestown, the New World adventure from the makers of Downton and Medici: Masters of Florence, the Netflix hit about the Medicis who bankrolled the Italian Renaissance.

Now he’s giving us a lockdown lift with another boxset to binge, Miss Scarlet and the Duke. A tongue-incheek historical crime drama about Britain’s first female detective in Victorian London, it goes out on the Alibi network. He’s also just finished working on Dampyr, a horror film set during the Bosnian War of the 1990s so was already at home before the lockdown hit anyway, with wife Lisa Mcgrillis, (who plays the amiable airhead Kelly in Mum) and son.

Like a lot of freelancers, for Martin most of the work stopped almost overnight.

“A lot of things I was waiting for suddenly went off the table because everything shut down. A film set is in some senses a mass gathering, 100 people all in close proximity. But I’m lucky, I’ve got a bit of work over the next wee while, voice overs and stuff.

“But it’s a worrying and upsetting time for everyone and for those on zero hours contracts and the service industry, it’s really hard,” says Martin who has steady TV and film work now, but didn’t always.

“As actors, that’s often what you’re doing, where your main money comes from; bar work, nannying, taxi drivers and all that stuff. Those people are living week to week.”

But Martin is definitely enjoying the time with his family, locked down in a lively, happy house. Lisa, threeyear-old Josh and Albert the cat, can all be heard at various times in the background – Lisa from downstairs when he shouts down to enquire about his age.

“You’re 34!”

“Thought I was 35,” he says. “I’ve just gained a year.”

And Josh wondering when his daddy is coming to play with him, followed by Albert, who bursts into the room and meows a lot, building his part of actor’s cat. “He rules the roost,” says Martin. “Any time I say to Lisa ‘let’s go to LA, take Joshy, or come to Italy’, she says ‘What about Albert? What about Albert?’.” Albert meows in approval.

Martin sounds happy with his lot, despite the worry of coronavirus, not least on account of his parents in Ayr and Lisa’s in Carlisle, but apart from that he’s savouring the lack of deadlines.

“Usually you’re going ‘right, up in the morning, got to do this!, and you’re distracted. Now you really spend that time with each other.

“And the community stuff that’s coming out of it is lovely. There could definitely be a re-set for us all after this.

“It’s a horrific situation, but later we can look back, for example at what happened to pollution levels. Those will be very real statistics that can’t be denied by politicians and big business who say global warming doesn’t exist. At the moment people aren’t driving around in cars, taking all those flights. And I’m a terrible one for it, because I work six months of the year in Europe and fly home every weekend because I need to see my family. You’re