For actor Sanjeev Bhaskar and writer and creator Chris Lang, season five of Unforgotten is full of new challenges and uncomfortable moments. But by the end of this season, we’re left with a glimmer of hope. As Sanjeev and Chris discuss the final episode of this season, we’re reminded that even in the most difficult of situations, there is always the promise of new beginnings.
WARNING: This episode contains spoilers for Unforgotten Season five
Unforgotten creator and writer Chris Lang knew it would take time for both audiences and characters to grieve the loss of the beloved Cassie Stuart, played by Nicola Walker, and welcome in Jessica James, played by Sinéad Keenan. In this episode, Lang reveals some of the decisions he made when crafting this transition, and why the obvious choice was to lean into the unexpected.
A man facing financial ruin fakes his disappearance while kayaking in the North Sea. His wife mourns with their two sons, has her husband declared dead and collects the insurance payoff, then he moves secretly into a hidden bedroom in their house. Later, the couple flee to Panama, where the scam unravels after an unwise photograph. The boys are summoned to meet their dead dad in a London police station.
Screenwriter Chris Lang, who wrote ITV detective show Unforgotten, is known for creating twisty, psychologically complex plots, but the real-life story of John and Anne Darwin – which he has turned into his new ITV drama The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe – is beyond even his imagination. Such was media coverage of the story when the pair were tried and jailed in 2008 that Lang could have considered naming it Unforgettable. But more than a decade later, the exact details aren’t quite as easy to remember.
“I was surprised how much I’d forgotten,” says Lang. “As I read the research material, I kept thinking: oh yes! But then there was a huge wealth of stuff I had no idea about: how they executed the idea, why they decided to come back.”
Lang has conjured a vividly told farce about a hapless eccentric fantasist, which looks set to resonate with the public – judging by reactions to the show’s promotional material. “When I tweeted the first picture of the poster, there were people saying: ‘They were only going after insurance companies … and they’ve been fucking us over for decades,’” says Lang. “But that wasn’t the crime that attracted the prison sentences; it was what they did to their kids.”
The unpleasant way Anne Darwin pretended to her children that their father was dead is what attracted Monica Dolan to play her. It’s the latest in a series of roles as criminals in ITV dramas, including prolific serial killer Rose West in Appropriate Adult and Maria Marchese, the London resident jailed for her terrifying stalking of an ex-boyfriend, in U Be Dead. Dolan relishes the challenge of parts viewers will dislike, maybe even detest. “I’m loth to make excuses for a character,” she says. “I just do what the character does in the script and try never to resist that.”
Despite it being John’s idea to settle his huge debts by claiming his death payout, it was Anne who received the longer sentence: three months longer than the six years and three months her husband received. Just as Medea, who killed her children, is more notorious in Greek tragedy than numerous psychopathic men, maternal cruelty seems to have been viewed as more transgressive than that of the dad.
“Sadly, we’re pretty used to men behaving appallingly to children,” says Lang. “There is something more interesting about a woman and mother committing this betrayal than a father.”
Watching Lang’s version of events, viewers may conclude that Anne was a victim of coercive control by her husband, who is shown to have a strong romantic and sexual hold over her and to make all the decisions for both of them. This was raised in her defence, though, crucially, the concept of coercion was less legally defined than it is now.
When she was tried,” says Dolan, “the person accused of coercion had to be physically present at the time of every alleged offence.” So long-time psychological grooming or emails from Panama didn’t count.
When the series was shooting in Hartlepool last April, Boris Johnson was in town, supporting his candidate in a byelection that turned the north-east seat Tory for the first time in five decades, partly due to the argument that such seats had been neglected by London politicians and exploited by the capital’s bankers. Dolan believes that, in that sense, the Darwins can be seen as victims: John, a man of modest background, was given loans to purchase a dozen buy-to-let properties. When he concocted his plot, he owed £700,000.
“Not to diminish what they did,” says Dolan, “but the way the banks just loaned money to people, it was inevitable things like this would happen. The extent of their debt was mind-blowing.”
Dolan stresses that she and Eddie Marsan as John are playing “characters written by Chris”. Neither Darwin parent nor their sons cooperated with the project, so it draws on research and the manuscript of an unpublished book by journalist David Leake.
“You have to imagine a fair amount of it,” Lang admits. “You research and research then take that little leap. It is a guess, but it’s a really educated guess. You can’t say that really is what happened or what’s going through her mind. But how much do any of us know ourselves anyway? If I’d been able to sit down Anne and say: ‘Why did you do it?’ I’m not sure she’d be any clearer than me.”
… with a paddle … Eddie Marsan in The Thief, His Wife and The Canoe. Photograph: Helen Williams/ITV
But without permission or input from the living originals, does the writer feel a responsibility to them? “Of course,” Lang replies. “There’s huge moral responsibility and we talked about it an awful lot. There’s a duty to the boys but also to John and Anne. You can’t defame them, you can’t make stuff up. In terms of the kids, I’d be astonished if they didn’t think it was a sympathetic portrayal of what happened to them. We are entirely on their side that this was a heinous crime against them.”
But what if they just didn’t want to be dramatised in primetime and featured across the media again?
“The rebuttal to that is that the boys gave a huge interview to the Daily Mail. Anne wrote a book and did many interviews. The Darwins have spoken to the press multiple times. So the being left alone defence doesn’t hold up.”
The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe joins ITV’s Quiz (about the alleged “coughing” fraud to win Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?) and BBC One’s A Very English Scandal (reconstructing a murder plot instigated by then Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe) in an emerging subgenre of jaunty, comic real-life crime capers. Because no one died in any of these crimes – though a dog was killed in the Thorpe story – the dramatisations have more licence to entertain.
The series’ executive producer David Nath says: “We said from the start we shouldn’t shy away from the humour in this. I’m starting to wonder if we are reaching a saturation point with hard dark true crime. What are the iconic stories of that sort left to tell? Also, with where we are in the world just now – first Covid, now Ukraine – I’m not sure if it’s the most inviting prospect to watch something really gruesome. I think the sweet spot is the true story that is also enjoyable.”
Panama fakers … Eddie Marsan as John Darwin and Monica Dolan as Anne Darwin in The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe. Photograph: ITV/PA
Getting true stories right is also an obsession of Dolan. For Rose West, she trawled through a mound of NHS spectacles to find the right pair. With Anne Darwin, the challenge was dental – finding false teeth that would give the fuller-faced Dolan narrower features. And, although helped by having grown up in nearby Middlesbrough, she also worked with a dialogue coach on the tones of the Darwins’ native Seaton Carew.
“One of the things I’ve learned is that if you are doing an accent you should learn it with your false teeth in! You don’t want to do it one way then put in the teeth and have to start again because the dentures change the sound,” she says.
When the shoot was over, Dolan donned a different pair of dentures to play the pioneering artist Audrey Amiss in Carol Morley’s forthcoming biopic, Typist Artist Pirate King, then gave one of the year’s best stage performances as Sister Aloysius, a nun who suspects a priest of child abuse, in a revival of John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt: A Parable. Despite Aloysius being the kind of dislikable character she enjoys playing, there was a key difference – which caused problems.
“I knew something felt wrong, and I had to consciously force myself not to put my hand to my mouth,” she says. “Then I realised it was because, for the first time in so long, I only had my own teeth!”
There’s more continuity to come for Lang, who has moved on to the fifth series of Unforgotten, ITV’s brilliant police procedural, with Sinéad Keegan replacing Nicola Walker as Sanjeev Bhaskar’s cold crimes co-investigator. Both shows involve ordinary people doing one wrong thing they seem to have got away with, until fate exposes them.
“That’s where my main interest lies,” says Lang. “I think we’re often on the verge of tipping over into extreme behaviour all our lives, and sometimes we do. So it’s about trying to understand that – and the stress that must place on the way you live your life. I suspect that certain people who’ve committed crimes are more adroit at living with that duality. But plenty of people are destroyed by it. That’s what I want to explore.”
The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe is on ITV and ITV Hub from 17 April
What drew you to write The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe?
I got sent a load of research material in May of 2020. Maybe 50 press stories, a 1000 pages of police interviews, a 1000 pages of court documents, and an early manuscript of a book by the journalist who broke the story, Dave Leigh. Every time I turned a page of the research, there was another extraordinary revelation. I kept finding myself thinking, “I can’t believe they did that. And then that. And then that.” It was just a story that kept on giving and so saying ‘yes’ to it was a no-brainer.
Which element of the story particularly caught your imagination?
The incongruity of this very ordinary couple from Hartlepool hatching this very extraordinary plan, which then came undone in an exotic Central American country. The juxtaposition of those two worlds was very rich territory.
Their story was also very unusual in the sense that it was undeniably tragic, but also, on occasion, bleakly funny. As a screenwriter, that is very fertile ground.
Eddie Marsden and Monica Dolan in “The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe”
What motivated you to make Anne the narrator?
In many ways, John Darwin is a relatively easy character to understand (his is the story of a narcissist) but Anne is much more complex, so to try to understand how a mother could have committed such a heinous crime, I decided to place her at the centre of the piece, and then create a device which allowed us to hear her inner monologue, her actual thought processes.
How did you do that?
Well, because she didn’t want to talk to us, there was necessarily a degree of imagination involved, but it was an ‘educated imagination’ , because I was also drawing on a lot of research (the police interviews, court reports, press interviews and Dave’s manuscript) to help me understand her journey.
Why do you think Anne was so obedient towards John?
I think that in a complex and insidious way, she’d been controlled by her husband for decades. She was also terrified of being alone, of being deserted by him (indeed that was one of his constant threats to her). Also, once she told the big lie, once she had stepped over that line, it became harder and harder to admit the appalling truth. Even after the story finally broke, it still took her another four months to tell the whole truth (that she had been in on it from the start) to the police. There was a kind of cognitive dissonance going on in her head. She wasn’t able to admit it, even though it was clear to everyone that the whole thing was artifice.
But you do not underplay the hideous things she did, do you?
Not at all, we owed it to the sons, the real victims of John and Anne’s crimes, to be truthful. I can’t imagine a greater betrayal than a mum telling you your dad is dead when she knows he is actually still alive. Pretending to be grieving for five years, allowing them to grieve for five years – what would possess a mother to do that? It seems unthinkable to any parent.
How would you describe John?
He was quite charismatic, quite funny (sometimes even intentionally) but also a man with absolutely no conscience and no sense of how his actions would be perceived. Like many narcissists, he was also desperate to appear more successful than he was, which ultimately was the cause of his downfall.
What other clues to John’s character did you gather?
John had a Range Rover with personalised plates which shouted out to the world, “look at me, look at how well I’m doing” but in truth, he had catastrophically overreached himself. This was a man who earned a relatively modest salary as a prison officer (she was a GP’s receptionist) but who had mortgages on nearly 20 properties, none of which he could service. His downfall was grimly inevitable.
What does Monica Dolan bring to the role of Anne?
Monica was the first person everyone thought of for the part. She has that ability to totally inhabit a character and became Anne in a way that I don’t think any other actress could have. Anne could easily have been played as a thoroughly dislikeable person, but she is much more complex than that, and we needed an actress that could bring the audience along with her on that difficult journey. Ultimately, this is a story of redemption, of what a family can and can’t survive, of what it can and can’t forgive, and Monica takes us on that journey brilliantly.
Why is Eddie Marsan so right for the part of John?
Eddie has incredible range, he can play very dark, he can play very ordinary, but whatever he plays, he always brings such humanity to his characters. And this was key for us, because we never wanted John to just feel like a monster. The character has to have a twinkle as well as a dark side. Eddie captures that brilliantly.
Did the Darwins cooperate with you at all?
No. But there was so much material in the public domain that it didn’t feel like we were missing anything. Anne had written her own book and felt she didn’t have anything more to say. John didn’t cooperate either. He lives in the Philippines and is remarried now. But it’s still a very first-hand account. The script is based on multiple press interviews, police records, court records, interviews that the journalist David Leigh did, and my own educated guesses at how certain conversations might have played out.
Do you see this as a very English story?
Very much so – the seaside setting, the ordinariness of the couple, that sense of things going on behind the net curtains. You’d never have imagined that this very ordinary couple could have been hatching this extraordinary plot that they nearly got away with. It’s a brilliant slice of English life.
Do you think The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe will strike a chord with viewers?
I hope so. I’m sure many of us have dreamt up extraordinary solutions to our problems and then stepped back from the precipice. The only difference between us and the Darwins, is that they jumped.
Spoiler Alert: This episode contains spoilers for Episode Six of the Fourth Season of Unforgotten.
The truly tragic ending of the fourth season of Unforgotten made series creator and head writer Chris Lang tear up as he wrote it. Lang talks Jace Lacob through the twisty fourth season of his series, and looks ahead to what’s in store for the planned fifth season of his modern day crime drama.
When times are tough, we turn to detective fiction. Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes story was published during the long depression of 1873-96. Raymond Chandler’s hardboiled ’tec sprang from the 1930s slump. In 2020, as the pandemic ravaged us all, detective fiction offered resolution and even a sense of justice being done.
As 2021 gets under way, television is proving the point. Death in Paradise, McDonald & Dodds and the mighty Unforgotten are hauling in ratings and critical plaudits, all offering detectives who are, for want of a better word, ordinary. Wildly different though they are, these are not shows in which the divorced alcoholic cop returns to a lonely TV dinner and stares blankly into space for hours on end. These are shows where comprehensibly irascible people track down killers and problems are solved. They are stories of a society that works.
“I think these shows have an innate sense of decency and optimism that underpins them all,” Unforgotten’s creator Chris Lang explains. “It’s compassion and a belief that people are essentially good. If I had to define the essential DNA of Unforgotten, it’s that good people can do bad things.”
ANDREW CROWLEY/CAMERA PRESS
For those who haven’t tried it, Unforgotten is a cold case show in which Nicola Walker and Sanjeev Bhaskar are detectives who solve decades-old crimes, bringing justice to those long dead and punishing those who thought they’d escaped. Its guiding principle — and that of the real-life police units that inspired it — is remarkable: that a wrong committed is still wrong, even if it took place 30 years earlier. Families deserve comfort, killers deserve justice.
Lang, 59, whose long career writing TV drama began on The Bill after a brief career as an actor, was inspired by the 2012 arrest of the TV presenter Stuart Hall for child sex offences.
“I remember seeing him with his lawyer outside Preston crown court, suddenly changing his plea to guilty, and I was thinking about the adjustments taking place that very second with his wife, his son and daughter, his colleagues and of course the British public and our relationship with him,” he says. “That’s why in Unforgotten we see the antagonists at the outset, living normal lives, but having done something extraordinary underneath it.”
In the past eight years, he argues, we’ve seen polarisation in all aspects of life, whereas reality is nuanced, complicated and messy. His show, he says, is about how the more certain we become, the more dangerous things get. In season four, for instance — spoiler alert if you haven’t watched the first two episodes — Lang’s cops’ focus turns inwards after the decapitated corpse of a Millwall fan is discovered in a freezer after a house clearance. The suspects were police officers at the time, now living complicated but largely successful lives. Walker’s character, Cassie, is on their trail, although, forced back to work to retain her generous police pension, ambivalent about her career.
“I’m constantly confused by my conflicted relationship with the police,” Lang admits. “I’ve had many police officers as advisers, and I’ve always found them extremely delightful. I remember reading about the London Bridge attacks where an off-duty copper managed to fend off a terrorist and was seriously wounded. I was very moved by the privilege of having people like that looking out for us. Yet we also know the negative side of the police: the endemic racism, an inability to admit their mistakes, corruption, all sorts of problems. It’s both a love letter and a j’accuse to the police.”
This new uncertainty, I say, is curious in a writer whose deft plotting has made him one of the UK’s most successful TV exports. While we are gorging on Scandi noir or Call My Agent!, European viewers can’t get enough of Lang’s shows — his work is constantly remade; his 2012 drama A Mother’s Son is being filmed in Finland, the fourth country to adapt it.
“I like writing stories that provoke fundamental debate that transcends cultures,” he says. “The litmus test is: does it make my friends disagree? In A Mother’s Son, the question is: if you suspected your son had killed someone, would you hand them over to the police? I was going to a party with about 20 friends, threw the question out there and they all started arguing. I thought, ‘OK, yes, that’s a good pitch.’”
Unforgotten is Lang’s most successful show to date, although for many years he may have looked like the slowest starter of a surprisingly successful group. At school in Reigate he sat next to Keir Starmer in German O-level lessons and played drums in a band with Norman “Fatboy Slim” Cook and Paul “Beautiful South” Heaton. He left Rada for rep at the Nottingham Playhouse, where he started writing sketches with a fellow trainee called Hugh Grant.
Chris Lang’s career highlights include ‘dreadful’ writing with Hugh Grant, right
Chris Lang’s career highlights include ‘dreadful’ writing with Hugh Grant, right
SHEILA BURNETT/ARENAPAL
“The first day I met him, I was struck by how unbelievably funny he was,” he recalls. “We had the odd line in Coriolanus, but we mainly brought furniture on. By chance we ended up writing a short sketch and putting a little show together for Nottingham Playhouse. It was about Robin Hood giving an interview; Hugh came on dressed as Robin in a very fetching Lincoln green doublet and hose, and the zinger line was, ‘When did you first realise you were merry?’” He permits himself a quiet grin. “Still gets a laugh. We did sketches for a few years, a bit Not the Nine O’Clock News-y. And we did a TV show that was dreadful . . . Then — for some reason — he decided being a global movie star was a better career move. But the Hugh Grant you see in Paddington, that’s his natural home.”
Lang wrote sketches for Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones, got fired by Jonathan Ross and joined The Bill’s writing team “because they were looking for writers, and they might give me a job”. He gradually built his career, but was knocked off course by his first wife’s suicide 15 years ago.
“Suicide is such a brutal, brutal grief and loss to suffer.” He pauses. You don’t have to respond, I say. He shakes his head. “I don’t think I would have been as optimistic as I am now if it hadn’t happened, because there is nothing more guaranteed to allow you to see the good in humanity than when you suffer deep pain and tragedy yourself. I was just enveloped by love, care, compassion, as were my children. Coming out of this just extraordinarily awful thing, there was all this beauty and love. I don’t think I’d have had the faith in society that allowed me to write Unforgotten before.”
With Unforgotten, he feels he has fused all he has learnt about work and life, but, he stresses, that doesn’t give him answers. “I’m still trying to understand human nature and its complexity, increasingly so in a binary world. Unforgotten is political with a small ‘p’, and I would like to explore that more. As I’ve got older, I’ve become more politically aware. I’d like to articulate some of the wrong turns I think our country has taken.”
Who needs maverick detectives, with their vintage cars, flowing coats and unorthodox methods? The best sleuth on our screens right now is the decent, dedicated and quietly diligent DCI Cassie Stuart, who returns tomorrow in ITV crime drama Unforgotten.
Brilliantly played by Nicola Walker, Cassie might not be a mercurial rule-breaker with a drink problem (like Robbie Coltrane in Cracker), a torrid love-life (like Tom Burke in Strike) or a penchant for violence (like Idris Elba in Luther) but she gets the job done. She’s methodical, by-the-book and utterly believable as she brings killers to justice. She’s precisely the sort of reassuringly British, level-headed model of professionalism we need right now. Her defiance of genre tropes is, in itself, quietly subversive.
Indeed, Cassie was created as a conscious antidote to TV’s obsession with tortured heroes on the trail of ghoulish serial killers. “I’d written a lot of police procedurals,” explains Unforgotten creator Chris Lang, who started out writing for The Bill. “There was always pressure from broadcasters to find something unique and different about each copper. They wanted a quirk or eccentricity – “Give her a Bentley!’ – which I found slightly superficial. So I tried to strip all that away and see if I could get away with it.”
Not for Cassie the signature vehicle or garments of The Bridge’s Saga Norén (Sofia Helin), with her classic Porsche and military greatcoat. Even dear old Vera Stanhope (Brenda Blethyn) has her floppy hat and Land Rover. No, the Cassie character dresses down and drives an anonymous saloon car. That’s because she was inspired not by her fictional forebears but by her real-world equivalents.
Lang’s experience of police officers, who he’d used as advisers and research tools throughout his career, was a world away from the flawed geniuses of clichéd crime fiction. “They’re just ordinary people doing an extraordinary job,” he says. “Detectives tend to be just like you and I. Their job is the most unusual thing about them.”
Lang wrote the part with Walker in mind, having worked with her twice before. “The seeds were sown when she played a copper in [his 2012 miniseries] A Mother’s Son,” he recalls. “One scene in a mortuary blew me away. A young girl had been killed and Nicola was this extraordinary blend of tender and steely.”
That mix is what informs Walker’s portrayal of Cassie. As a widow and mother of two layabout student sons, she displays the patience of a saint at home – albeit one prone to the odd burst of sweary sarcasm. At work, though, she’s a woman on a mission.
There’s a scene in Monday’s episode when she bites her lip as her cantankerous father Martin (Peter Egan), who has early onset dementia, callously belittles her. Walker’s subtle reaction is a masterclass in simmering restraint. This contrasts starkly with a spiky argument with her ineffectual boss, then warm familiarity with her best friend DI Sunny Khan (Sanjeev Bhaskar). It’s a nuanced, emotionally intelligent performance.
Each six-part series begins with the discovery of a long-hidden body. The duo doggedly uncover what happened, narrowing down their investigation to a seemingly unconnected guest cast of suspects. (The first three series are available on streaming services.)
Now comes the fourth chapter, which opens with the discovery of a headless, handless, deep-frozen corpse in a London scrapyard. Cassie and Sunny set about identifying him and unravelling his tragic story.
When writer Chris Lang created the MASTERPIECE Mystery! series Unforgotten, he looked to capture the very ordinary extraordinariness of a modern police force. With a new season on the way, Lang explains what viewers should watch out for as Cassie and Sunny unearth another unidentified body beneath a London roadway construction site.
Ahead of his new drama ‘Dark Heart’, the acclaimed writer explains his commitment to diversity, the terror of launching a drama, and why he gave up on acting
(Ed Power for The Independent)
“Dark Heart” -DI Will Wagstaffe [Tom Riley].
When the #MeToo scandal erupted last year, Chris Lang was naturally shocked and angered. But while relieved to have never witnessed such misconduct during his time working in British television, the blockbuster dramatist also had to accept that in less lurid ways, the industry here has ill-served women and minorities.
“Like everyone, I read those stories with horror and a degree of bafflement, because I’ve never encountered anything like it,” says the 57 year-old. What he had noticed, though, is the subtler ways in which women are undermined in the industry.
“First in terms of how they are portrayed in front of the camera,” he says. “But in addition, the opportunities they are given behind the camera. It’s just got to change.”
Lang has quietly done his bit. Unforgotten, his engrossing cold case procedural, which returned for a triumphant third series in July, featured unglamorous middle-aged leads – one a white woman, one a British-Asian man – even as it took care not to pat itself on the back for doing so.
And though his new ITV drama Dark Heart stars the more conventionally moody Tom Riley as a gumshoe detective, the writer has been at pains to portray London in all its vast, bustling diversity.
Lang insists that the casting of each of his shows is 25 per cent black, Asian and “minority ethnic” – BAME in industry parlance. It’s something on which he will not compromise.
“I do that on everything,” Lang says. “I will not let it not happen. We’ve got to start doing the same [behind the camera]. Making sure our crews and our writing teams are fully inclusive. We are slow to the table on that one. It’s got to change.”
Audiences don’t flock to his work, though, because it is a feel-good celebration of multiculturalism. They do so because of his remarkable facility for grounding the crime genre in the real world – making both heroes and villains plausible and vulnerable.
Unforgotten’s lead detectives, played by Nicola Walker and Sanjeev Bhaskar, are so everyday you can imagine meeting them at the school gates. Lang’s killers, meanwhile, tend to be ordinary people who have committed monstrous acts rather than the traditional thriller bogeymen.
But he also appreciates that the worst thing you can do in popular entertainment is continue giving viewers precisely what they expect. Which is why Dark Heart is about as far from Unforgotten as possible whilst still cleaving to the circadian tempos of the classic British crime drama.
Where the earlier series was plain-spun and unflinching, Dark Heart is heightened and noir-ish. If Unforgotten is drama without any makeup, Dark Heart arrives caked in eye-shadow and lip-gloss.
Riley stars as Detective Inspector Will Wagstaffe, a loner cop whose haunted disposition is a consequence of the mysterious deaths of his parents when he was 16. When not sulking around London’s more baroque corners, he’s busy investigating a sequence of brutal vigilante killings of suspected paedophiles.
Along with all that, he has an up-and-down relationship with his girlfriend Sylvie (Miranda Raison) and a strained friendship with sister Juliette (Charlotte Riley, last seen in Mike Bartlett’s Press).
This is, in other words, a pulp caper with its hands wedged deep in its trench-coat pockets. It’s moody and visceral, indebted to the ubiquitous Scandi noir but equally to David Fincher’s feverishly, ghastly Se7en.
“Dark Heart is as different as you can imagine from something like Unforgotten,” says Lang. “Tonally different, stylistically different… it just has a very different feel.”
He’s grateful ITV gave him the opportunity to branch out (or at least circle back – Dark Heart having started as a two-hour movie aired in 2016 on the now defunct ITV Encore). He’s just as aware that Unforgotten fans might not be exactly thrilled to see him try something so radically disparate.
“It’s kind of terrifying. But listen, it’s terrifying for everyone launching any drama at the moment. A couple of shows have landed recently. A lot have not. There are a lot of shows out there. Hopefully yours punches through. It’s tricky.”
All of his work is personal to one degree or another. But for all its superficial pulpiness, Dark Heart – adapted from Adam Creed’s Will Wagstaffe novels – feels especially close to home. Having lost his parents, Wagstaffe has had to overcome terrible tragedy (the tagline is, “Some wounds never heal”).
Much the same could be said of Lang, whose first wife, Lydia, died by suicide in 2007. He had three young children to raise and a precarious career as an up-and-coming writer for television (at the time he was working on The Palace, a quickly forgotten alternative history about the royal family).
That journey from his original calling as an actor to screenwriter was a multi-year project. When he was 24, Lang travelled to Edinburgh with his best mate to perform a spiffy new comedy routine they’d written together. The piece – a Python-esque sketch entitled The Ealing Nativity – went down a storm. So much so that were invited to reprise it on the Russell Harty show on BBC1.
As they warmed up in the dressing room, an assistant popped her head around the corner and explained they’d be doing their bit live, to eight million people. Lang’s partner-in-chuckles – an unheard of young pratfaller named Hugh Grant – was a nervy sort, not entirely confident in his talents. Lang, by contrast, took the challenge in his stride.
“I thought I was hilarious and among the finest actors to ever leave Rada,” he recalls. “When you’re young, you need to be insanely confident. I look back at some of the things I did then, and just cannot believe them.”
Yet Lang, for all his youthful self-assurance, was never truly obsessed with burning up the stage or screen. Under the brash exterior, part of him knew that, compared to many of his Rada classmates (including Janet McTeer), he was crushingly mediocre. “Acting wasn’t in me,” he says. “I didn’t have the skills. I did it because it was fun. But it was never the thing that drove me.”
Writing for the screen was where his heart lay. So as his old mucker Hugh went off to charm Hollywood, Lang knuckled down and transformed himself from callow ticklers of ribs to the architect of some of British television’s most compelling and provocative thrillers.
The 120-minute Dark Heart pilot went down well two years ago (though because of ITV Encore’s honking obscurity the audience was negligible). There was also positive feedback from international buyers – crucial as British broadcasters attempt to grow their global profile.
Nonetheless, when he went back to chop the feature into two 60 minute episodes and to then expand Dark Heart into a full, six-parter, Lang made several revisions. A more mainstream audience would be watching on ITV; the new edit had to reflect that.
“Now it’s less violent… less explicit. I had been happy putting out the original on an obscure channel – happy to do something quite esoteric. For a mainstream show, you want the audience to engage and keep coming back. There were certain things I wanted to pull back on. Violence was one of those.”
Not that the all-improved Dark Heart is exactly a frolic through the gladioli. Episode one opens with a man strapped to a bed force-fed liquor through a funnel. Thereafter it ramps up the gruesome factor with a certain enthusiasm.
As already pointed out, it’s worlds removed from Unforgotten, or his previous offering Innocent. There, the bloodshed was largely off-screen. Dark Heart is far more visceral, and it’s not unimaginable that it might cause an outcry among unsuspecting viewers. It’s the opposite of a cuddly watch.
The week of our interview, there were rumours that Netflix might swoop for series two of recent smash Bodyguard. If so, that would follow on from the streaming behemoth snatching Peter Morgan’s The Crown from the BBC.
Lang, who is somewhat improbably working on a French-language romantic comedy for Netflix, doesn’t believe the big streaming players represent an existential threat to indigenous drama. There is enough of an appetite for riveting stories to keep everyone busy.
“I watched The Crown and loved it. That has a budget of what…£10m an episode? But I would have just as happily watched Happy Valley, which costs say… £1m an episode. I wouldn’t say either is better or worse. The issue with huge budgets is that they can be spent not entirely wisely. A limited budget forces you to make canny creative decisions. Having too much money can be as big a problem as too little.”
Above all, he’s glad drama has regained its place at the heart of British television. A decade ago, all the chatter was that reality TV was steamrolling everything else. Today X Factor, Big Brother et al are seemingly in a death spiral, while Unforgotten and Bodyguard have become national talking points.
Not that Lang is sniffy about his viewing habits. Last night, he curled up to The Great British Bake Off with his family (he has remarried and now has five kids). He was as riveted as the rest of us by each triumphant sponge and tragic tartlet.
“Bake Off is drama masquerading as a cookery show,” he says. “A lot of those shows have built-in drama – and the editing is so clever.
“Ten or 15 years ago,” he continues, “those shows were doing very well and people were predicting the end of drama. It’s expensive – reality costs a tenth of what drama costs. But people like stories – they are an important part of our life. Drama offers a shape that the real world often doesn’t. And we need that.”
(by Morgan Jeffrey for Digital Spy)
First launched with a feature-length pilot two years ago, ITV’s Dark Heart is finally returning for a full series, with Tom Riley reprising his role of DI Will Wagstaffe.
So why the long wait? And with the original pilot being recut into the first two episodes of the new series, will we notice the leap from episode two to the newly-shot episode three and beyond?
“I was first asked to adapt the first novel in the Wagstaffe series [by author Adam Creed] eight years ago,” Dark Heart writer Chris Lang, best known for scripting ITV’s other crime hit Unforgotten, tells Digital Spy.
“It was by the BBC. I wrote a script which – for any number of the reasons scripts don’t fly – did not land at the Beeb. Then someone who I worked with at the BBC moved to ITV, and a few years later, they picked it up and said, ‘We always liked the script. It should have gone.”
“They were looking for projects for their new channel – or new-ish channel – Encore at that point, which could be a little more edgy, a little darker, a little more provocative. And this seemed to fit the bill.”
The two-hour Dark Heart pilot aired on November 9, 2016, but the closure of ITV Encore led to a hiatus before a full series could go into production for ITV. “There was a contractual obligation to allow them to be able to show it for 18 months, I think,” Lang says. ”
We would’ve gone to a series quicker if there hadn’t been a tie-in with Encore for a year or so. But that gave us time to start getting our ducks in a row.” (read the full interview at Digital Spy)