TV News: Nemesis

The BBC have announced a new 8-part spy drama, Nemesis, starring Melissa George as a "complex and mysterious Bourne style female spy unlike anyone we've seen on TV before" (by the by, a role she sort of played in Alias):

Nemesis is an original eight-part suspense thriller set in the world of international espionage.

At the heart of the drama is Sam played by Melissa George (The Slap, In Treatment), a highly skilled operative for an elite private intelligence firm who survives an attempt on her life that may have been orchestrated by members of her own team. Once she returns to the firm, she performs her secretive duties without knowing who to trust and who wants her dead.

Adam Rayner (Hawthorne, Mistresses) plays Sam’s colleague at the firm and love interest. The dedicated and complex members of the firm operate in the shadows, must often confront life and death situations on secret missions and are sometimes unaware of who or what they are fighting for.

Filming has started and will take place on location in Scotland, London and Morocco.

Read the whole press release here.

The Body Farm - Coming Soon to BBC1?

A few months ago I mentioned a proposed sequel to Waking the Dead, called The Body Farm which would focus on Dr Eve Lockhart played by Tara Fitzgerald. Clips from the show appeared in a recent BBC Drama trailer and a new press release has just come out:

Starring Tara FitzGerald, who reprises her role as Dr Eve Lockhart from the hit BBC One series Waking The Dead, and Keith Allen as Detective Inspector Hale, The Body Farm is an original new six-part crime drama series for BBC One.

The Body Farm centres around the work of a team of scientists, led by Eve Lockhart, working at the cutting edge of forensic detection. Their base is a remote farm from which, with the aid of donor bodies, they conduct research on behalf of Police forces around the world into the many ways in which murders can be committed and sometimes disguised. As the harsh economic climate eats into their funding, and the Home Office's own forensic facility falls victim to cutbacks, Eve accepts DI Hale's offer for The Body Farm to leave the hidden world of academic research for the visceral front line of murder detection. Eve, of course, is no stranger to murder in its many forms, but her new team find themselves rapidly thrust into an unexpectedly brutal new world.

Eve's team comprises Rosa, Mike and Oggy. Wunmi Mosaku (Moses Jones, Father And Son, I Am Slave, Silent Witness) is Rosa, an expert Botanist, who is young, beautiful and perhaps too eager to put her research into practice. Mark Bazeley (The Damned United, The Queen) plays Mike, haematologist, business partner and, most importantly, an old flame of Eve's. Finlay Robertson (How Not To Live Your Life) is Oggy, a Forensic medicine PhD with a computer obsession. Oggy has had his head buried in his Body Farm research for so long that he has begun to fear the real world.

The whole press release is here plus there are links to interviews with the cast from that page and details of episode 1.


Will you be watching The Body Farm?

The Field of Blood - on BBC1 soon

The Field of Blood based on Denise Mina's book of the same name will be begin on BBC1 on Monday 29 August between 10-15pm and 11-15pm. I'm not sure when the second part will be on yet.

From the BBC Press Office:

The Field Of Blood is set in Glasgow and centres on would-be journalist Paddy Meehan (played by Jayd Johnson), a young copygirl working in a newspaper office.

Paddy dreams of becoming an investigative journalist – believing that in miscarriages of justice, reporters are sometimes the only hope. Funny, smart and feisty, Paddy seizes an opportunity to kick-start her career and becomes embroiled in a dark murder case. For Paddy, it's the opportunity of a lifetime but it comes at great personal cost.

It's 1982 and Glasgow is shocked by the horrific murder of two-year-old Brian Wilcox. Paddy is fascinated by the story and waits, along with the rest of the city, for the inevitable arrest of a murderer. When Paddy's 10-year-old cousin is charged with the crime she faces a stark choice between the two defining elements in her life. On one side is her job at the paper and dreams of becoming a journalist; on the other is her tight-knit Catholic family who want her to stop all this career nonsense and settle down to a quiet life with her fiancé. Paddy puts family first and decides not to use her inside track on the story to secure her first scoop.

Unfortunately for Paddy, glamorous colleague Heather has no such scruples and the secret shame of the Meehan clan is splashed across the front pages. Shut out by her family, Paddy decides to look into the case to prove her cousin's innocence. Defying her boss, she sets about investigating the case but there are shocking consequences for someone close to her.

You can read interviews with the director and some of the actors at the BBC website.

I reviewed the book The Field of Blood in 2006.

January's Books to TV shows

The tv version of Michael Dibdin's Zen series will begin on 2 January on BBC One at 9pm. It starts with the second book in the series, Vendetta, and stars Rufus Sewell as Aurelio Zen. Cabal will be shown on 9 January. Read an interview with the stars, Rufus Sewell and Caterina Murino on the BBC website.

In Vendetta, Zen is called upon by the Ministry to re-investigate a multiple murder. Flamboyant millionaire and Government construction magnate Oscar Faso and his guests have been shot dead at his lavish villa. Prime suspect and friend of Faso, Renato Favelloni, has "found God" in prison and is retracting his confession, a move which stands to send shockwaves through Government – so Zen must intervene. All the evidence points towards Favelloni's guilt but Zen is convinced he is innocent. Zen heads into the mountains to investigate, reluctant to leave the promise of romance with Tania Moretti, the Chief's new assistant.

As he leaves, news breaks of another murder: Judge Bertolini, an anonymous figure in the Italian judicial system, is shot dead in his car. What Zen doesn't realise is that this unconnected murder is part of a vendetta carried out by a man wrongly imprisoned by Bertolini years earlier. More importantly, Zen's involvement in the case means he is next on the hit-list.

As he struggles between doing the right thing and saving his career, Zen must contend with hostile locals, an attempted kidnapping and a chase through a maze of underground tunnels while the killers draw ever closer to him.

The tv adaptation of the fourth book in the Anna Travis series, Deadly Intent, by Lynda La Plante is being shown in January. The first of the three-parter will be on 3 January at 9pm on ITV1.

DI Anna Travis (Kelly Reilly) is back after her promotion, reunited with DCS James Langton (Ciarán Hinds) and DCI Mike Lewis (Shaun Dingwall), who is also promoted to head up his first murder case, a fatal shooting in a notorious drug dealer’s squat. The victim is Frank Brandon (Callum Sutherland), disgraced ex-police officer and friend of Langton’s. The team discover that Frank has recently married Julia Larson (Stine Stengade), a glamorous, wealthy woman, after working as her driver. It’s an incongruous set-up, and Travis digs deeper into the not-so-grieving widow’s story.

You can read more about the plot and also "Lynda La Plante explains why her latest protagonists in Above Suspicion work so well" at the ITV website.

TV News: The Field of Blood (Denise Mina)

The BBC Press Office has today released details of an upcoming tv adaptation of Denise Mina's The Field of Blood:

Set in Glasgow, 1982, crime drama The Field Of Blood centres on would-be journalist Paddy Meehan, a young copygirl working in a newspaper office.

Stuck in an almost exclusively male-dominated world of limited opportunities and cynicism, Paddy dreams of becoming an investigative journalist – believing that in miscarriages of justice, reporters are sometimes the only hope.

Funny, smart, and feisty, Paddy seizes an opportunity to kick start her career and becomes embroiled in a dark murder case. For Paddy, it's the opportunity of a lifetime but comes at great personal cost...

Filming on The Field Of Blood, a thrilling investigative drama, begins in October with casting to be announced in the coming weeks. The drama will transmit on BBC One Scotland in 2011.

Caroline Parkinson, Creative Director, Creative Scotland, said: "Creative Scotland is delighted to be working with Andrea Calderwood at Slate North and BBC Scotland, in bringing to life the first of the Paddy Meehan series, The Field of Blood by Denise Mina to Scottish audiences. A gripping two-part thriller, it will be set and filmed in Glasgow and Creative Scotland hopes that this marks the first in a long series from this impressive team."

(The Paddy Meehan series was intended to be 5 books but it seems to have stopped at 3.)

Hello to Jason Isaacs

The Bookseller announced today that Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie books are to be televised. Brodie will be played by Jason Isaacs, who is already familiar with the role as he is the narrator of the abridged editions.

Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie character is to come to TV screens next year in a new adaptation for BBC1.

“Case Histories” will be a six-part series adapted from the Transworld author’s mystery novels Case Histories, One Good Turn and When Will There Be Good News? The stories revolve around private detective Brodie, who will be played by Jason Isaacs, who was Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies.

Upcoming crime dramas on the BBC

Here are the crime dramas announced on the BBC's Press Release for their Winter/Spring highlights, including Luther written by Neil Cross:

Luther

A new kind of crime thriller for British TV starring Idris Elba (The Wire). In each exciting and fast-moving story, the murderer's identity is known from the start, focussing the drama on the psychic duel between hunter and quarry, who sometimes have more in common than either would like to think.(*with Paul McGann)

Five Days

In the second series of this award-winning drama, a tiny newborn baby is abandoned in the toilets of a Yorkshire hospital. At the same time, the Trans-Pennine commuter train is halted by a suicidal jumper. Are they connected? From this moment on, the lives of those onboard the train and in the hospital will be changed irrevocably, not least for DC Laurie Franklin (Suranne Jones), off-duty that day but travelling on the train with her mum (Anne Reid), who is recently diagnosed with Alzheimer's.

Five Daughters

A three-part drama serial by acclaimed writer Stephen Butchard (House Of Saddam), Five Daughters (working title) is a sensitive portrait of events surrounding the discovery of five young women tragically murdered in Ipswich in 2006.

Made with the co-operation of Suffolk Police, and other agencies involved in the case, this factually-based drama will tell the story of three of the women's lives through the eyes of family members and friends, as well as following the inside story of the police investigation.

Ashes To Ashes

Gene Hunt is back in all his Eighties splendour for the final series of this hugely-popular series which promises more twists and turns than ever before.

The Silence

A deaf girl witnesses a murder in this new four-part drama. Eighteen-year-old Amelia Edwards (Genevieve Barr) has recently been fitted with a cochlear implant, enabling her to hear, but she struggles to accept that she has a place in the hearing world.

Breaking free from her over-protective parents (Gina McKee – In The Loop, Fiona's Story; and Hugh Bonneville – Lost In Austen), she goes to stay with her party-loving cousins, homicide detective uncle Jim (Douglas Henshall – Collision, Primeval) and warm-hearted aunt Maggie (Dervla Kirwan – Ondine, Moving On).

Amelia witnesses the audacious murder of a policewoman, and is reluctantly propelled further into a loud and frightening world. Jim is assigned the case and, when she identifies a police officer on the drugs squad as one of the killers, he urgently needs to protect his niece. If his colleagues find out what she has witnessed, she will be in extreme danger from the very people he works with. But, by keeping her a secret, he will jeopardise his own position in the force and put his whole family at risk.