Censor sensibility

Julie Walters, who plays Mary Whitehouse this week on BBC2, tells Michael Deacon that there was more to the campaigner than angry rants...

We can never know what Mary Whitehouse would have made of the news that Julie Walters is to play her in a film of her life. But we can take a reasonable guess. “I’m sure she would have disapproved of some things I’ve done,” says Walters. “The Wife of Bath, Personal Services… Someone in America said, ‘There’s something there to offend the whole family.’”

Personal Services was a 1987 film in which Walters starred as the madam of a brothel – not exactly Whitehouse’s cup of tea. And you could say that about more than a few things on television. From 1963 until her death in 2001, the Nuneaton-born teacher-turned-campaigner protested against what she saw as British television’s flouting of decent moral standards.

As BBC2’s new one-off drama, Filth: the Mary Whitehouse Story, shows, she fired off endless letters of complaint to broadcasters and gave impassioned public speeches. Televised discussions of premarital sex, swearing in Till Death Us Do Part, the wanton disregard for authority displayed by the children’s puppets Pinky and Perky… All were contributing, Whitehouse believed, to a collapse in morality in British society. To fight back, she famously launched the Clean Up TV Campaign and formed the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association (now known as Mediawatch UK).

When Walters was young, however, she thought Whitehouse was merely a killjoy. “She figured highly in my teens and twenties,” she says. “To my generation, she represented our parents. It felt like she was spoiling the fun.” Unsurprisingly, a lot of people who made television weren’t too keen on Whitehouse either. Walters recalls seeing her “cruelly lampooned” by ITV’s Eighties puppet satire Spitting Image.

But Filth, says the star of Educating Rita and Billy Elliot, doesn’t mock Whitehouse. If that had been the aim, she says, she wouldn’t have taken the part. “I was sent another script about her, but it was having a lot of fun at her expense,” she says. “This one was different – it was very balanced. It explains who she was, where she was coming from. It’s easy to take the piss out of someone like her.” No, that’s not an expression Whitehouse would have cared for. But Walters is right: Filth is, a lot of the time, sympathetic to the tireless campaigner (although some scenes make her seem a little dotty, or short-tempered).

It starts by showing what prompted Whitehouse to launch her protests, then her efforts to form a pressure group made up of like-minded West Midlands women. But the central story is about Whitehouse’s long and fiery battle with the BBC’s Director General from 1960-68, Sir Hugh Carlton Greene, played as a crude, sneering bully by Hugh Bonneville. Time and again he refuses to meet her – but she devises plenty of other ploys to get his attention.

Researching and playing the part changed Walters’s opinion of Whitehouse, she says: “I was surprised by her compassion, and she was a good mum. In retrospect, she had a point. There’s a watershed because of her. Children shouldn’t view things that they’re not emotionally developed enough to deal with. I don’t have a Mary Whitehouse attitude, but I do believe in the watershed.” After all, Walters is a mother herself. When her daughter Maisie was a child, they were watching a drama (Walters can’t remember its title) that contained a scene of a nature Walters hadn’t bargained for. “Mum,” said Maisie, “why has that woman taken her knickers off?” Walters said, “I think it’s by accident…”

She didn’t feel the need to shield Maisie from every programme that Whitehouse disapproved of, though – soaps in particular. “I couldn’t stop that because of my own addictions,” she says. “When she was born, we came home from the hospital and we were sitting on the sofa and the EastEnders theme tune came on. Her little head looked straight at the telly.”

Of late, Walters has been working on plenty of family-friendly entertainment, with the exception of Filth (which inevitably contains swearing). She’ll be Ron Weasley’s mum again in the fifth Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (out before Christmas), and will play Aunt Betsey in a new film version of David Copperfield (which should be out next year). In July she appears in Mamma Mia!, an Abba-inspired romantic comedy film.

At 58, Walters is one of Britain’s best-loved actresses, and this year she was made CBE for services to drama. She’s recently been writing her autobiography. She seems so pleasant in person that it’s hard to imagine the book containing many Whitehouse-style tirades. Still, she says, there are things that make her angry: “Rudeness, racism, snobbery, tiredness, Cellophane things you can’t open…”

Swearing and sex scenes on television, though, aren’t among them. Indeed, Walters confesses to being a fan of one modern-day show that would surely have horrified Mary Whitehouse more than any from the past. “I was glued to Celebrity Big Brother,” she says. “It was grubby stuff, but I couldn’t switch it off.”

Filth: the Mary Whitehouse Story is on BBC2 on Wednesday at 9.00pm

The Street gets third BBC series

A third series of Jimmy McGovern's award-winning drama The Street has been commissioned by BBC Fiction boss Jane Tranter. The new series will air on BBC1 in 2009 and further explore the "darker side of human nature", according to the corporation.

Made by ITV Productions, McGovern will once again work on the six-part series with new writers. Casting for the new series has yet to be agreed. Previous cast members include David Thewlis, Timothy Spall, Jim Broadbent, Gina McKee, Jane Horrocks and Sue Johnston. McGovern – whose credits include Cracker, The Lakes and Hillsborough – co-created The Street with Sita Williams and they will both be executive producers the third series.

Williams said: "It is a great credit to Jimmy McGovern that we have won the most prized drama awards for two consecutive years." BBC Independent Drama commissioning editor Polly Hill said: "I am delighted that The Street will return for a third series. Jimmy's compelling storytelling and the wonderful cast it attracts continues to deliver powerful drama about ordinary folk. We are delighted it's captured the audience's imagination and are thrilled to see it receive an RTS and BAFTA for the second year running."

The Street has also won an International Emmy for Jim Broadbent's performance.

ITV's Fincham wants more of The Fixer

The new ITV director of television, Peter Fincham, has made his first commissioning decision since starting his job - ordering another series of ITV1 drama The Fixer. Fincham has given the thumbs-up to a second run of the drama, which stars Party Animals actor Andrew Buchan, Tamzin Outhwaite (left), former Shameless actor Jody Latham and Peter Mullan.

The Fixer premiered on ITV1 with an audience of 6.3 million viewers and overall the six-part series averaged just under 5 million, making it the network's highest rating new drama this year. Fincham promised the drama about a soldier who becomes a paid assassin targeting people who have escaped the law will be even "bigger and better" when it returns. "The Fixer was a gripping first series that had an unmistakable touch of class. I'm delighted that it's coming back - it'll be bigger and better than ever," he said.

Jane Featherstone, the joint managing director of Kudos, which makes The Fixer, and the show's executive producer, added: "We're thrilled to be bringing The Fixer back and look forward to more fun and action from our unique team of renegade crime fighters."

It is understood that the new series will contain more action, while keeping the tense, claustrophobic atmosphere of the first run. An ITV insider said the second series was also likely to include cameo roles by some star names.

Ex-BBC1 controller Fincham began his job at ITV last Monday, May 12, and is said to be keen to bolster ITV's drama department, which suffered a disappointing reaction to new shows such as The Palace and Rock Rivals earlier this year.

The Fixer was commissioned by Laura Mackie, the ITV director of drama. It was created by Spooks and Party Animals writer Ben Richards and is produced by Faith Penhale and joint executive produced by Simon Crawford Collins.

Whishaw to star in BBC thriller

The BBC is to broadcast a drama from Hawking writer Peter Moffat, starring Ben Whishaw as a young man imprisoned for murder despite protesting his innnocence. The five-part drama, called Criminal Justice and due to be shown on BBC1, features Whishaw, star of the recent film Perfume, as Ben Coulter, who wakes to find that a woman he has just slept with has been stabbed to death.

Whishaw's character is unable to remember what happened and the drama follows his life in prison and his encounters with the criminal justice system. His co-stars include Pete Postlethwaite as a hardened criminal called Hooch and Bill Paterson as the policeman investigating the murder. Rome actress Lindsay Duncan plays Ben's defence barrister in the drama, which has been commissioned by the BBC Fiction controller, Jane Tranter, and will be shown in the summer.

Kate Harwood, the BBC head of series and serials, said: "This is not a prison, legal or police drama. Peter Moffat has created something beyond these labels. He has delivered an exceptional and audacious piece of writing – full of colour, texture and humour. This is a combative, insightful, and sophisticated look at the criminal justice system."

Former barrister Moffat's previous dramas have included the BBC2 film Hawking, about scientist Stephen Hawking, and the BBC1 series Cambridge Spies, as well as the critically lauded but short-lived legal series North Square for Channel 4. His forthcoming dramas include BBC1's Einstein And Eddington, starring David Tennant and Andy Serkis.

Sean Bean and Sam Neill to star in Crusoe series

Sam Neill and Sean Bean are to feature in a big-budget production of the Robinson Crusoe story being made by a UK independent producer for US network NBC. Crusoe is to be played by Philip Winchester, who featured in the 2004 movie remake of Thunderbirds, while the role of Friday, his companion on the desert island, is yet to be cast. Flashbacks of Crusoe's life are interwoven with the action, with Bean playing his father James, Neill playing family friend Jeremiah Blackthorn, and Anna Walton playing his love interest Susannah. Joss Ackland will appear in one episode in the role of Judge Jeffries.

The series, written by Stephen Gallagher and directed by Duane Clark, follows the swashbuckling adventures of the two island dwellers as they contend with marauding militias, hungry cannibals, wild cats, starvation and lightning storms. NBC's Crusoe is the first TV remake of the Daniel Defoe novel since the 1964 French children's drama series The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, which was repeated on UK TV during summer holidays for many years.

Power, the show's UK producer, claims this is the first time a US network has directly commissioned a British supplier for nearly 40 years. The producer is currently looking for UK distribution for the series, which will screen in the US next year and has also been sold to other territories including Canada.

Crusoe has a production budget for 13 one-hour episodes of $25m (£13m) and the Power chief executive, Justin Bodle, has promised "a landmark piece of event television" and a "new take on an old favourite".

The series is currently filming in the UK and the production will soon move on location in South Africa and the Seychelles. Executive producers are Justin Bodle for Power, Michael Prupas for Muse and Genevieve Hofmeyr for Moonlighting. Previous productions by Power, which was founded in 1995, include Flood, The Virgin Queen and Casanova.

BBC reveal two new dramas

Atonement actor Gina McKee and Jeremy Northam, who was last seen in The Tudors, have signed up for BBC1's hard-hitting drama about a family torn apart when the husband downloads child pornography. Fiona's Story, which has echoes of the case involving The Thick of It actor Chris Langham, is based on "extensive research", according to the BBC.

McKee, who has also appeared in The Street and Tsunami, will play a mother who battles to keep her family together after her husband, played by Northam, who also starred in Gosford Park, is accused of downloading indecent images of children. The 90-minute one-off programme, being made by BBC Scotland, has been written by the newcomer Kate Gabriel. Fiona's Story will be produced by He Kills Coppers' David Boulter and executive produced by Matthew Read.

Filming begins today in Glasgow for four weeks, with broadcast expected at the end of the year or early 2009. Anne Mensah, the head of drama for BBC Scotland, said: "Fiona's Story is an amazing piece of writing. It has an emotional intensity at its heart which captivates everyone who reads the script." Boulter added: "Fiona's Story is the heartbreaking tale of a marriage breaking down. Its power lies in writer Kate Gabriel's original voice, which has attracted top-level talent across the board."

Langham served three months in prison last year after being found guilty of 15 counts of downloading indecent images of children.

Elsewhere, the BBC has confirmed that it is also developing a biographical drama based on the life of the legendary Daily Mirror journalist Marje Proops. The as-yet-uncast drama is likely to be aired on BBC4 if it gets the green light and is understood to be an in-house BBC drama production.

Proops' own autobiography, her 1975 book Pride, Prejudice and Proops (Time Remembered), is likely to provide source material for the script, which is still in development. The drama is also expected to rely on information contained in Angela Patmore's 1992 biography of the journalist, which claimed that she had a long-standing love affair while married to Sidney Proops.

Proops became a journalist in 1939 and joined the Daily Mirror as a fashion journalist. She later became famous for writing the Dear Marje advice column for the paper, which was accompanied by a trademark photograph of her clenching a pen between her teeth. She was made an OBE in 1969 and continued writing her Mirror column until her death at the age of 85.

The development of the drama follows a successful run of one-off autobiographical dramas on BBC4. BBC4's biopics, which aired in a season called The Curse of Comedy, examined the lives of figures including the entertainer Hughie Green, who was played by Trevor Eve, and another about Tony Hancock, who was played by Ken Stott. Another about comedian Frankie Howerd starred David Walliams as the comedy actor, while a fourth examined the troubled relationship between Steptoe and Son actors Harry H Corbett and Wilfrid Brambell, who were played by Jason Isaacs and Phil Davis respectively.

A BBC spokeswoman confirmed that the Marje Proops project was in development.

Walters to play Mary Whitehouse in new BBC TV drama

Mary Whitehouse, the campaigner who embarked on a one-woman mission to clean up British television, will be played by Julie Walters in a new BBC drama, it was revealed yesterday. Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story will bring to life the battle for morals that raged in the 1960s, the BBC said. Hugh Bonneville will star as Sir Hugh Carleton Greene, the former Director-General of the BBC, whom Whitehouse held mainly responsible for the moral collapse of the country.

The animosity between the two culminated in a bitter fight to broadcast the word “knickers” in the Beatles song 'I Am the Walrus'. Whitehouse was an unknown housewife and teacher from the Midlands when she began campaigning in 1963.

Backed by her loyal husband Ernest (Alun Armstrong), Whitehouse set out to fight a war to stop “filth” entering family homes via the television.

Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story will be broadcast on BBC Two on May 28 at 9pm

HBO film about 2000 recount draws protests from Democrats

Wounds from the Florida recount, still healing for many Democrats, are being ripped open again for some prominent former advisers to Al Gore. They say that a coming HBO film dramatizing the ballot battle after the 2000 election unfairly blames them for the Democrats’ failure to secure the White House.

Warren Christopher, the former secretary of state who served as the public face of the Gore team in the early days of the recount effort, said this week that he believed the film, Recount, was “pure fiction” in its portrayal of him as a weak strategist unprepared to stand up to the aggressive tactics of James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state who was the chief Republican adviser. William M. Daley, Mr. Gore’s campaign chairman, who helped to lead the Democratic recount team in Florida, said the film created misperceptions about the Gore team’s decision-making process. Mr. Gore, who oversaw the team from Washington, is largely absent from the film.

Even Mr. Baker questioned the portrayal of Mr. Christopher. “I don’t think I was as ruthless as the movie portrays me, and I know he was not as wimpish as it makes him appear,” Mr. Baker said. The film, which has its premiere on May 25 on HBO, stars John Hurt as Mr. Christopher, Tom Wilkinson as Mr. Baker, Mitch Pileggi as Mr. Daley and Laura Dern as Katherine Harris, then the Florida secretary of state. Kevin Spacey plays Ron Klain, the Gore lawyer who led the on-the-ground recount effort and through whose eyes much of the action is seen.

As many dramatizations do, Recount includes invented scenes and dialogue. Danny Strong, who wrote the screenplay, said in an interview that while those inventions condensed events, they reflect what actually happened. “The film tries to give the essence of the truth,” he said, and is based on his own research and interviews, as well as on books and newspaper and magazine articles documenting the recount effort.

Dramatizations of historical events, particularly political ones, have frequently given trouble to writers and producers trying to create compelling entertainment. In 2006 ABC made changes to The Path to 9/11 after complaints from former Clinton administration officials that it portrayed them as less than vigilant in their pursuit of Osama bin Laden. CBS dropped plans to show The Reagans, a 2003 mini-series, after Republican and conservative groups protested its portrayal of President Reagan as forgetful and unsympathetic to AIDS victims. (The series was broadcast on Showtime.)

Recount, which has been screened for invited audiences in Washington and New York and will be shown in Florida this week, is inspiring similar protests. “I think a lot of the strategizing in the script that I saw was somebody’s hindsight rather than what we had to deal with in the immediate aftermath of the election,” Mr. Daley said. He added: “The perception that Warren Christopher was some wuss who got hoodwinked by Jim Baker is absolute fantasy in the mind of somebody who is trying to make themselves out to be bigger than they were.”

Neither Mr. Christopher nor Mr. Daley has seen the completed film, which has been sent to television reporters and critics for review. Mr. Daley said he requested and was given a draft of the script last year by HBO after filming had begun. Mr. Baker, who has seen the film, said he reviewed a draft of the script before production began and requested changes that were incorporated into the film.

Mr. Christopher said he learned of the film from his tailor, who was asked by the filmmakers to reproduce one of Mr. Christopher’s suits. He said he offered to review the script but never received one. The New York Times gave him a transcript of the scenes in which his character appears. “I was stunned by the excerpt,” he said in an interview. “Much of what the author has written about me is pure fiction. It contained events that never occurred, words I never spoke and decisions attributed to me that I never made.”

The film portrays Mr. Christopher as blocking attempts by other Gore advisers to rally protesters and to take the fight over disputed ballots to court. He is depicted as backing away from confrontation during a meeting with Mr. Baker, seeking compromise and negotiation as the Republicans prepare for war. The portrait stands in stark contrast to Mr. Baker’s. This is largely because the film is edited to jump directly from scenes in which Mr. Baker prepares the Bush team for “a street fight,” giving directions about where to stage protests, to scenes where Mr. Christopher counsels caution and calls for an “orderly process” without protesters. That characterization of Mr. Christopher has some support. Accounts published in The New York Times in 2000 characterized Mr. Christopher as urging caution and a disciplined approach to the recount.

Early reviews of Recount have been positive. Writing on huffingtonpost.com, Jeffrey Wells calls it “a thoroughly engaging, first-rate political drama.” But, he added, “I can’t see how this film won’t be seen as having done serious damage to the reputation” of Mr. Christopher, whom Mr. Wells says is portrayed “as one of the great all-time wimps.” Mr. Strong disputes that characterization. “It was our goal to show him as a noble statesman who held a deep concern at how the rest of the world would be negatively affected if the United States was not able to handle a disputed election in a non-violent manner,” he said.

The film is Mr. Strong’s first produced screenplay. Also an actor who appeared for four seasons on Gilmore Girls, Mr. Strong said he focused his book research on four works by reporters who covered the 36 days between the election and the Supreme Court decision that ended the recount. Mr. Strong gave several people depicted in the film the opportunity to review the script before filming began. Among them, he said, was Mr. Klain, who oversaw much of the day-to-day activity in Florida after Mr. Christopher returned to California for a family matter.

Mr. Klain said the film “gets the big things right,” but faults its portrait of Mr. Christopher. “He was as intense and vigorous an advocate for Vice President Gore as anyone there,” Mr. Klain said. Mr. Christopher and Mr. Daley were interviewed by the film’s creators only after filming began. Mr. Christopher said he was told that scenes involving his character had already been filmed; Mr. Strong denied that, saying the scenes were to be filmed that day. Mr. Strong confirmed that Mr. Christopher offered to review the script but, he said, he decided not to send one. “I didn’t feel comfortable sending it to him because I didn’t feel that he was being totally candid in our interview,” Mr. Strong said. “He wasn’t as forthright with me as other people I’ve interviewed.”

Mr. Strong also said that the film did not intend to pin the blame for the Democrats’ defeat on anyone. In a later interview, though, he said Mr. Christopher and Mr. Daley “wanted to concede from Day One.” He said that conclusion was supported by one of his primary sources, “Too Close to Call,” a book by Jeffrey Toobin, who served as a consultant on the film. In it Mr. Toobin argues that by the end of the first week, both Mr. Daley and Mr. Christopher were “making the case for surrender.”

The director of Recount recently gave an interview about his HBO docudrama on the Florida recount, in which he discusses how you know you’re funny and the difficulties of running for office...

As the director of “Meet the Parents” and other hit comedies, you adopt a surprisingly sober tone in your coming film, “Recount,” which takes us back to the 36 days in the autumn of 2000 when the results of the presidential election remained disputed in Florida. Have you shown the film to Al Gore?

He has not seen the film as far as I know.

It stars Kevin Spacey as Ron Klain, the lawyer for the Democrats. Has Klain seen the film?

He likes it. It’s kind of painful for the real people to relive it. It’s painful for everybody to relive. Particularly the Democrats who are involved in it. They always say, “Can’t you change the ending?” That’s always the joke.

I thought the film was very fair, except, perhaps, that the actors who play the Democratic operatives are more physically appealing than the Republican operatives.

That’s interesting. I think Tom Wilkinson, who plays James Baker, is a very handsome man.

He’s kind of beefy, though. Laura Dern, who plays another key Republican, Katherine Harris, is smothered in pancake make-up.

People get nervous when they’re thrust into the public eye. There was a rumour that someone told Harris that when you’re on TV, your make-up washes out so don’t be shy with those eyelashes and with that lip colour.

You give dimpled chads great prominence in this film, as opposed to hanging chads.

The hanging chads get a few close-ups too. Hopefully we’ve put punch-card machines into permanent obsolescence, because they really are just unacceptably primitive.

As the director of all three Austin Powers films, you resisted turning Recount into a comedy. It’s not a comedy at all.

No, no one in Recount says, “Yeah, baby, yeah.” There are no zinger catch phrases.

You and Mike Myers are rumoured to be working on a fourth Austin Powers film, but nothing has emerged since Goldmember in 2002.

Whenever I talk with Mike, we talk about it. The pressure is always there. But the script should earn its existence. It has to be really funny.

It sounds as if you have standards.

I try. The standard in comedy is so much easier because, like, is that going to be funny or not? You can usually tell.

What do you make of the fact that Austin Powers and Borat — you produced Borat — are both regressive male personalities in pursuit of bimbos?

I don’t disagree.

Are you like that, too? Are you trying to live in the mojo zone?

I think men are obsolete to some extent. I was going to do a film called "Used Guys" about a future where women run the world because they finally figured out that men are poisoned with testosterone and shouldn’t be allowed near anything sharp or explosive.

What did your father do for a living during your childhood in Albuquerque?

My dad is a retired engineer. He used to work for Sandia National Laboratories.

Was he helping to develop nuclear power?

He worked on aspects of that. But he worked in energy research and other things as well. He couldn’t talk about the work he did.

So he was an Austin Powers-style international man of mystery.

An Albuquerque man of mystery.

When did you leave New Mexico?

I went to Stanford to be a lawyer, and I really thought I might go into politics.

You do sort of look like a governor.

I get confused with City Councilman Bobby Shriver sometimes. People literally come up to me in Santa Monica, and he’s told me the same thing.

Maybe you have a future in politics.

I’m not equipped. I have terrible stage fright.

Home-grown, everyday sadism

If Ellen Page ever worried that her roles in Juno and Smart People would too securely set her image as a feisty know-it-all, she chose well to appear in An American Crime, a film that manages to wrench all the placid innocence from her bones, writes Gina Bellafante. The movie, which appeared at the Sundance Film Festival last year and which made its debut on Showtime on Saturday, calls for none of her verbal wood chopping. Indeed, it demands a listless opposite, turning Ms. Page’s body into a cadaver long before her character becomes one, speaking to us softly, phlegmatically and from the grave. Ms. Page is all dreamy, spectral passivity; she mesmerizes. But so much is done to her that it is hard to know what she is actually doing.

Children are victimized so frequently on television these days — the babies left in Dumpsters on Law & Order: SVU, the boys or girls raped or chained up on Medium — that we may think we’ve become inured to depictions of such abuse. But An American Crime is such a shocking study of the will to defile, so forensic in its details, that it arrives as an act of vengeance against our habituation.

Based on the true story of Sylvia Likens, a teenage girl in Indianapolis in 1965 who found herself subjected to cruelties any adjectives applied here would only cheapen, the film almost begs us to look anywhere else. Her parents, carnival workers, leave her and her younger sister in the temporary care of a local laundress named Gertrude Baniszewski. Sylvia is burned, bruised, beaten and sodomized, the horrors magnified by the viral quality of her steward’s sadism. Before long, it isn’t merely Baniszewski drawing the blood, but her lot of vacant-looking children and a whole neighbourhood of young novices bored into violence.

Tommy O’Haver, the film’s director and co-writer, tips us to its agenda in the economy of his title. Sylvia had the misfortune to be born to parents who were comfortable leaving her with a stranger, but she also had the bad luck to grow up in a time and a place where ignorance was understood as its own brand of wisdom. The 1960s haven’t yet sounded the nation’s social alarm clock. Images of Vietnam flicker on television sets (Mr. O’Haver gives us President Johnson making a speech about General Westmoreland) but no one in an Indianapolis of church picnics and girl-group pop is paying heed.

Sylvia’s community, we learn, did nothing to save her. An older neighbour of Baniszewski’s, in cheap make-up that she seems to think will dignify her, had a faint hint of what was going on, but testifies at Baniszewski’s murder trial that she simply couldn’t judge a hard-working woman who seemed to be struggling. Despite all the visual terror in An American Crime, the single most disturbing moment is aural: Sylvia explaining in post-mortem voice-over, quite matter-of-factly, that her parents kept working, leaving her younger sister behind again, after the trial, this time with a local district attorney.

Mr. O’Haver understands the inexplicable nature of horrors like this one and he never panders to our reductive wish for clear answers. Gertrude Baniszewski, portrayed brilliantly by Catherine Keener, was clearly a woman who struggled: she had respiratory problems, multiple children with different men and virtually no money. But Mr. O’Haver doesn’t redeem her with a more extensive biography, a litany of whatever deeper mistreatments she surely endured. Ms. Keener takes on the role as if she were built on a skeleton of rusty needles. Looking at her, we know plenty. Baniszewski hates the purity of Sylvia, a quality she can neither reclaim for herself nor bequeath to her daughters, whose young lives already seem destined for similar miseries.

An American Crime is the most brutal evocation of wrongdoing to appear in quite a while; it is hardly a pleasure to watch. But it is also one of the best television movies to appear in years.

Take my wife. Please. I’ll take yours.

When the television series Swingtown has its US premiere on June 5, viewers can expect to see the following scenes in the first episode: a ménage à trois; a high school junior smoking pot and later flirting with her English teacher; the flagrant enjoyment of quaaludes and cocaine; and the sight of the neighbourhood scold unwittingly stumbling upon a groaning and slithering orgy. “Why don’t you kick your shoes off, Mom, and join the party?” is how a middle-aged participant, clad only in mutton chops, says hello.

Debauchery, however, is only an appetizer for the main story line: the open marriage of an airline pilot and his wife, who, in pursuit of new partners, set about seducing the businessman and housewife who have just moved in across the street. Seems like something that would be right at home on HBO or Showtime, where programs tend to loiter in the muck of moral ambiguity. But Swingtown, a one-hour scripted drama, will appear on CBS. Though perhaps not as prim and upstanding as it was when shows like Murder, She Wrote and Touched by an Angel defined its airwaves, this network tends to be more decorous than others where sex is concerned. So basing a series on sexual experimentation and other taboos, even if from a bygone era — Swingtown is set in the mid-1970s — is a notable experiment in and of itself, suggests Jacques Steinberg.

Swingtown was born in large part from a serendipitous collision of circumstances. A CBS executive happened to have a hankering for ’70s retrospection at a time when the network was looking for critical cachet and a way to expand its brand beyond grisly crime dramas and mainstream comedies. Swingtown, then, is something of a trial balloon.

One CBS official said it was probably inevitable that some companies now advertising on Without a Trace, the show temporarily yielding its time slot at 10 p.m. Thursdays to Swingtown, would beg off during the new show’s run. But with a subtle release of its 13 episodes between June and late summer (the heart of its promotional campaign is a teaser already on YouTube and spots on classic-rock radio stations), the network is hoping to beckon new viewers without alienating old ones.



“We wanted to give people something fun and fresh in the summer,” said Nina Tassler, the president of CBS Entertainment and the person who green-lighted the series. “The summer gives you a kind of different license.”

In setting the tone for Swingtown, its producers— including Mike Kelley (a writer for The OC and Jericho) and Alan Poul (a principal director of Six Feet Under) — said they aimed to combine the raucous abandon of Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson’s tongue-in-cheek take on the 1970s porn industry, and the sweetness of The Wonder Years, the ABC series (starring Fred Savage) in which a grown man looks back on his upbringing in the late ’60s and early ’70s.

While Swingtown does not have a narrator, it is certainly born of an adult looking back on his childhood. In 1976 Mr. Kelley, the show’s creator, was 8 and living in Winnetka, Ill., the Chicago suburb in Swingtown. And while the show is fiction, he said he was inspired by his memories of the Harvey Wallbanger-fuelled parties that his parents and their friends staged on Saturday nights; he would often watch from a perch on the stairs.

When he wrote the pilot episode, he surrounded himself with photographs his mother took of those times, and some of their details have been virtually grafted onto Swingtown. One character drives a maroon Cadillac Eldorado convertible and works as a trader, just as Mr. Kelley’s father did. Another wears the long denim skirts his mother favoured and sips gimlet martinis, her favorite drink. (The singer-songwriter Liz Phair, a classmate of Mr. Kelley’s at New Trier High School, has created the show’s original score.) Mr. Kelley, now 40, also says that at least some of the show’s more salacious moments are based on real events. “I remembered one summer where the kids all hung out, and some of the parents in the neighbourhood kind of switched partners,” he said in a recent interview. “It felt like they all just moved one house to the left. Eventually most of those marriages broke up.”

In a later conversation Mr. Kelley’s mother, Marcia Arnold, speaking with her son at her side, said that particular recollection was “embellished a bit.” “Mike saw it through young eyes,” she said, adding that she had no frame of reference, for example, for anything remotely like the basement orgy depicted in the series pilot. (She has seen that first episode twice.) Mrs. Arnold did acknowledge, however, that within her circle of perhaps 20 couples, most of them in their 30s by the mid-1970s and many of them already parents to adolescent children, there were flirtations, breakups and eventually remarriages. “A lot of us married very early because that’s what you did, and some people grew apart because they probably shouldn’t have been together in the first place,” Mrs. Arnold said.

Mr. Kelley’s parents were among those who separated, much to his relief. “It was hard to see your parents so unhappy in something they didn’t seem to be able to get out of,” Mr. Kelley recalled as his mother sat next to him in the big backyard of his red-brick home, which is near Hollywood but looks like it could be in the northern suburbs of Chicago. “Even though I was 20, I remember feeling thrilled for Mother in particular.” He shifted his gaze toward her. “You did something that was right for you emotionally, personally,” he added.

With both his parents now happier in new marriages than they were in their first, Mr. Kelley said he has taken their experience to heart. “Watching my mom navigate her first marriage and the crazy second adolescence she and her friends seemed to be living in the 1970s inspired me to be as brave and honest as I can be in my own adult relationships and not worry so much about what other people think or say about them,” he later wrote in an e-mail message. “But the jury is still out for me on marriage and monogamy.” Asked if he is now involved in a relationship, he said only, “I’ve been lucky to have had a handful of primary relationships over the years, none of which society would probably deem conventional.”

In setting out to sell a story as unconventional as Swingtown, Mr. Kelley said, he did not immediately think of the broadcast networks. Mr. Kelley and Mr. Poul first pitched the idea to executives at HBO, where Mr. Poul had a development deal following his run on Six Feet Under. HBO passed, Mr. Poul said, at least in part because Big Love, which is about polygamy and was already in production, and Tell Me You Love Me, a soft-core treatment of intersecting relationships that was in development, were deemed too similar. The producers then began to shop their idea to Showtime.

But in the interim an acquaintance of Mr. Kelley and Mr. Poul mentioned to a dinner companion that her friends had conceived a TV series that touched on open marriage in the 1970s. Lucky for Mr. Kelley and Mr. Poul, that dinner companion was Ms. Tassler. Luckier still, Ms. Tassler’s second cousin, Nena O’Neill, had with her husband written “Open Marriage,” a well-known 1972 book that encouraged couples to consider experimenting sexually outside matrimony as long as everyone’s cards were on the table. (It went on to sell nearly four million copies through the decade and beyond.) “I said, ‘Oh, my God,’ ” Ms. Tassler, 50, recalled in a recent interview. “That’s right in my sweet spot, in terms of my nostalgia.”

Less than 24 hours later Ms. Tassler was reading the script. “It was a page turner,” she said. “I called the next day and said, ‘I want it.’” There was, however, the not insignificant matter of nudity and the graphic depiction of sexual acts. The script, as written for cable, was rife with both. Mr. Kelley, in consultation with Mr. Poul, was directed to do a rewrite. “I think we’re able to be more ground-breaking and more culturally subversive by putting this on a network, where more people will be exposed to it and where we’ll have to deal with these adult issues in an oblique way,” Mr. Poul said. Mr. Kelley agreed. “I actually think the shackles of having to show more explicit things every week to week to week on cable would have been far more constricting.”

What remains to be seen is whether viewers accustomed to the quick and easy doffing of clothes on cable will be interested in a network series about sex with no more nudity than an afternoon soap opera — and far less than NYPD Blue had on prime time on ABC in the 1990s. Still, whatever restraint the network and creators have imposed on themselves is unlikely to quiet a vocal segment of the viewing public that feels prime-time television is sufficiently polluted and in no need of a series in which the central characters may well go off to bed in groups of three, four or more.

“I have seen the promo for it that was posted on YouTube,” said Melissa Henson, director of communications and public education for the Parents Television Council, a watchdog group that has campaigned for years against what it considers inappropriate content on shows including NYPD Blue and, recently, 30 Rock. “It’s sort of driving a stake through an institution most of us regard as being fundamental to our culture and to our society,” she said. Ms. Henson added she would wait to see the show until she and her group would act. “We’re certainly disturbed by the premise,” she said, “or at least our understanding of the premise.”

None of the series’s stars will be immediately recognizable to most viewers. Molly Parker, who plays one of the lead characters, a housewife named Susan Miller, appeared in Deadwood and Six Feet Under on HBO, and Jack Davenport, who plays her husband, Bruce, was in the original British version of Coupling, a sex-obsessed comedy. The best-known actor to American television viewers is probably Grant Show, of Melrose Place, though he is hard to place behind the long blond mustache he has grown to play Tom Decker, the pilot.

Mr. Kelly gave Mr. Show one of the most memorable lines in the first episode (and in that YouTube trailer) — one that signals to viewers early the ride on which they are about to embark. “Your wife’s going to kill me,” a flight attendant says to Tom after she has inadvertently spilled a drink on his shirt in the cockpit. “My wife,” Tom says, a smile broadening on his face, “is going to love you.”

As terrifying as your real life

Aside from some of the more banal horrors of reality programming, Medium has nothing to rival it as the most frightful hour on television, says Ginia Bellafante. The series, which stars Patricia Arquette as an earnest telepath (Allison Dubois) who lends her powers of premonition to Phoenix law enforcement, has been a quiet success on NBC for four seasons, receiving some of its highest ratings in recent months as the show has delved further into the human capacity for selfishness and intimate depravities.

Medium creates a mood of gothic foreboding from the first few seconds of its opening credits. Its score recalls the tense chords of a Bernard Herrmann soundtrack, and the accompanying graphics look like the dark and unequivocally right answers to a Rorschach test — mutating hands and faces and evocations of dripping blood. Life in the 21st century provides so many opportunities to terrify us that popular culture has generally seemed enfeebled in its efforts to compete. Over the past decade, as movies have been less frequently consumed in the vulnerable territory of public space, the idea that they might possess the power to scare and undo us has become something of joke, rolfing the horror genre almost entirely into a satire of itself. And if television has been increasingly adept at producing anxiety (24, Lost, Jericho), it has rarely elicited anything resembling sensory fear.

Created by Glen Gordon Caron (and existing at a significant tonal distance from Moonlighting, his other great contribution to television), Medium can be genuinely hard to endure, especially at home, alone, late at night (it is shown at 10 p.m. on Mondays), without wondering whether you should check behind the bedposts for sadists and other wack jobs. Something terrible has always just happened, or is about to, and the viewer bears the apprehensive weight of Allison’s foreknowledge, having witnessed the violently detailed dreams that disrupt her sleep almost every other nocturnal hour. (No one has ever needed a regular prescription of Ambien more.) Sometimes Allison’s forecasts can keep a rape or a killing from occurring. Mostly, though, Allison receives random images in the night — a woman, for example, fighting with her husband in a hotel room in France — only to learn, usually the next day, that someone who looks like the person she dreamt about has disappeared, which propels her toward the evidence that allows the authorities to solve the case. The woman in France, Allison intuited, had been abducted by her embittered ex-husband and then psychologically tortured in a re-creation of the honeymoon suite in Paris that the couple had stayed in years before.

Medium borrows from the conventions of classic horror the idea that real nightmares result from arbitrary or misplaced trust. The camera lingers on the faces of victims in waiting as they put their faith in attackers whose malevolence they cannot yet see. An episode shown in the US early this year revolved around the killing of a little boy, supplying the single most chilling moment on television in quite a long while: a smiling child watched as a man, shot from the waist down, slowly kicked off his shoes and danced to “Rapper’s Delight” in front of him. The little boy had followed his kidnapper out of a toy store, lured by a marionette slung over the man’s back and lost to his father’s distracting business call on his cellphone.

Work, on Medium, has been implicated as a distinctly dangerous pastime more than once. At the end of last US season Allison’s husband, Joe (Jake Weber), an aerospace engineer, and his colleagues were held hostage at gunpoint by a fired employee who, dying of cancer, demanded millions of dollars in compensation for the loss of his health insurance and other benefits. Medium is so committed to the grim realities of middle-class life that it is a paranormal show that very often doesn’t feel like one. This season Joe has no job at all: it’s a tough economy, and he has found it impossible to find another. Allison’s credit cards are declined at a grocery store; her eldest daughter hasn’t gotten her allowance in weeks. Indian call centres operating on behalf of lenders phone the Dubois household constantly, and the bills keep falling, one on top of the other.

When Medium isn’t terrifying us with images of children about to be sodomized and killed, it is unsettling us with its belief that all of our systems and institutions essentially fail us. Families are fragile, and sons kill fathers. Charitable organizations are bilked by greedy maniacs. Journalists are sleazy and operate on falsehoods. (Last season Allison befriended a woman she thought was an out-of-towner looking for company, only to discover, after it was too late, that the woman was a reporter seeking to expose the Phoenix district attorney’s reliance on her unorthodox services.)

And, of course, what does it say about the skills of the show’s police officers and prosecutors that they depend so heavily on the musings of a psychic mother of three? It says that they just cannot hack it with their blood samples and clues and shoe leather. Allison’s notions are almost always infallible, but information isn’t. The scariest message from Medium, says Bellafante, is that we only have our instincts to guide us.

Jennie Garth returning to West Beverly

Jennie Garth, who played Kelly Taylor on the original 90210, will join the cast of the new spin-off on the CW channel. Ms. Garth will not be a regular but will play a guidance counsellor to the (probably) much more at-risk new West Beverly High kids at her alma mater, according to the Associated Press.

On 90210, Ms. Garth became a diet pill abuser, was trapped in a fire, became involved in a cult, used cocaine, was raped, shot, got amnesia and had a miscarriage, according to her career review. She'll apparently have a lot of advice to give, but she might be a bit rusty since her roles on What I Like About You with Amanda Bynes and Dancing With the Stars have been so squeaky clean. Garth, 36, departed the CBS comedy pilot My Best Friend's Girl last month.

Born April 3, 1972 in Urbana, IL, Garth was discovered at age 15 by a talent scout who suggested she head to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career. She did just that – dropping out of high school in her junior year to move west. Not long after arriving, she landed a role in the short-lived TV series Brand New Life (NBC, 1989-1990). Although "Life" did little to launch her career, its demise was quickly followed by landing her most iconic role – that of Kelly Taylor on Beverly Hills, 90210.

Playing the popular tramp-turned-good girl Kelly through the years afforded Garth the opportunity to not only grow up on camera in front of America, but to fully develop her character and improve her acting chops each season. From surviving getting burned in a fire, to battling a cocaine addiction, to dealing with all the love triangle drama of Kelly/Dylan/Brenda, Garth showed her versatility. Initially cast as the class tart with Shannon Doherty's Brenda the heroine of the show, Garth quickly emerged as the fan favorite – no doubt some of it a result of Doherty's real-life run-ins with the law and paparazzi. While a reported off-screen feud between seemingly the entire cast and wild child Doherty grabbing the headlines, Garth emerged from the scandals unscathed and above the fray.

Although Garth was raised on a horse ranch in the Midwest, she was entirely convincing as a spoiled Beverly Hills teen. It was this talent that opened up additional professional doors. The enterprising Garth taught good nutritional habits and fostered positive body image in teens with her 1992 video release, "Jennie Garth's Body in Progress." Acting-wise, she made her starring TV-movie debut in NBC's Danielle Steel's 'Star' (1993), playing Crystal Wyatt, a young woman who turns personal tragedy into professional success as a popular singer. Garth gave a solid performance, but the clichéd TV-movie failed to make a memorable mark. More impressive was the gripping ABC drama, Lies of the Heart: The Story of Laurie Kellogg (1994), starring Garth as a teen bride who puts up with ten years of abuse before convincing four young friends to murder her despicable husband (Gregory Harrison). Garth's turn as Kellogg was appropriately wrenching, eliciting well-deserved sympathy from the viewing audience. Later that year she played a rebellious young teen committed to a psychiatric facility by her out-of-touch parents in "Without Consent" (ABC), an entertaining telepic that marked Garth's first foray behind-the-scenes as executive producer. She next starred in the forgettable 1995 CBS thriller Falling For You.

While Garth had generally been cast as likable victims in her TV-movie work, her role in ABC's An Unfinished Affair (1996) broke that stereotype. In this soap drama, the actress played Sheila Hart, a scorned woman who takes up with her married former lover's naive son (Peter Facinelli) as part of an intricate revenge plot. Her performance as the colorfully contemptible character featured some delightfully wicked moments, and recalled her devilish early take on "90210"'s Kelly Taylor. Garth additionally had a role as the concerned girlfriend of a targeted shock jock's protégé in the HBO-aired feature "Power 98" (1996) and was featured in the Ireland-set political drama "My Brother's War" (released direct-to-video in 1998). She re-teamed with now real-life love Peter Facinelli, offering a cameo in the independent feature film, Telling You (1999).

Back in the "90210" zip code, the actress tried her hand at directing a 1999 episode during the program’s final season. With the bittersweet conclusion of the show's final episode in 2000, Garth was free after 10 years to pursue other adventures. After appearing in a few TV movies, she landed a role against type – that of older sister Valerie on the WB sitcom, What I Like About You (2002-06). A breath of fresh air after a decade's worth of primetime teen angst, Garth enjoyed a solid run doing situational comedy and watched as her younger co-star, Amanda Bynes, became a breakout star.

By the series' finale in early 2006, Garth could rest easy knowing that she was one of the few West Beverly High grads to escape the career-engulfing shadow of the iconic "902010." Not all her co-stars were as fortunate as she to find work and forge other successful identities. Though one – Ian Ziering – found a new kind of fame; that of hoofer-in-training on Dancing with the Stars (ABC, 2005- ). Caught in the audience cheering on her one-time onscreen flame, Garth must have caught a case of dance fever herself, as she was announced as one of several celebrity dance contestants on season five of the popular show. Garth put on a good show, making it to the semi-finals and impressing America with her growing confidence, as she learned complicated routines with her partner, Derek Hough – despite taking a tumble in the first few weeks. When Garth was eliminated on the ninth week of competition before the far inferior dancer, entertainer Marie Osmond, many people called foul – particularly the show's judges. Despite coming in fourth, Garth blossomed in front of America as she embraced her inner dancer.

Nesbitt and Neeson set for Ulster drama

BBC2 has commissioned a major drama about the Troubles in Northern Ireland that will feature James Nesbitt, with Liam Neeson also being lined up for a starring role. The one-off piece, to be called Five Minutes of Heaven, will be set in Belfast and tell a dramatised version of the real life story of 17-year-old Alistair Little, a member of the Protestant Ulster Volunteer Force.

Little was convicted in 1975 and spent 12 years in prison for the murder of 19-year-old Catholic Jim Griffin in Lurgan. The murder was witnessed by the victim's 11-year-old brother, Joe, and the film will look at the impact of his sibling's death on him and his family.

Hollywood star Neeson is expected to confirm soon that he will play Little as a grown man, while Murphy's Law actor Nesbitt will portray Joe Griffin in adulthood. Both actors were born in Northern Ireland and have previously appeared in films about the province's troubled history.

Neeson starred in the 1996 movie Michael Collins, about the early 20th century IRA leader and founder of the Irish Free State, while Nesbitt took a lead role in the 2002 ITV film Bloody Sunday.

The new drama will be directed by German Oliver Hirschbiegel, whose movie Downfall, about Hitler's last days, was nominated for a best foreign film Oscar. Five Minutes of Heaven is being written by Guy Hibbert, who penned the 2004 Channel 4 television film about the Real IRA bomb that killed 29 people in Omagh.

Hibbert said: "The impact of the drama is stronger still, as the story is about two real people who stand up and say it the way it is. It was important to get their full permission and co-operation. I have created this drama in their image, using their words and reactions. Working separately with both Alistair and Joe on the fictional areas provided a unique way of telling this story and revealed there were no easy answers."

Patrick Spence, the head of BBC Drama Northern Ireland, which commissioned the film from independent producer Big Fish Films in association with Ruby Films, said: "Northern Ireland is a society emerging from conflict. We wanted to develop and produce a single film, which, in a responsible way, marks part of that transition. We have done this by recording powerful personal testimonies of the two individuals whose lives have been determined by the Troubles."

The film's producer, Stephen Wright, added: "This film is not about finding a resolution or a happy ending. What we are attempting to achieve, in a balanced way, is to create a place where both men can tell their individual stories." Filming is due to begin on the drama at the end of the month in Belfast, for broadcast on BBC2 later in the year.

Five Minutes of Heaven, which also received finance from Northern Ireland Screen, will be produced by Eoin O'Callaghan for Big Fish Films and Wright for the BBC. It will be executive produced by Spence and Paul Trijbits, whose credits include Bloody Sunday, The Wind that Shakes the Barley and Touching the Void; and Cameron McCracken for Pathe, which will also distribute the film outside the UK and Ireland. Five Minutes of Heaven was commissioned by Jane Tranter, the BBC controller of fiction, and Roly Keating, the BBC2 controller.

Jones to appear in BBC Dickens drama

Ruth Jones, star and co-creator of hit BBC3 comedy Gavin & Stacey, is to turn her hand to drama by appearing in the BBC's adaptation of Charles Dickens novel Little Dorrit. The period drama, which tells the story of the Dorrit family and the rich array of characters they meet on their way from rags to riches and back again, is being written by veteran screenwriter Andrew Davies, whose most recent project was Sense and Sensibility.

Jones, who made her name in the BBC3 comedies Little Britain and Nighty Night, will play "colourful character" Flora Casby, the childhood sweetheart of Arthur Clennam, played by Matthew Macfadyen. Little Dorrit, which is being billed as one of BBC1's highlights for the autumn, will air in the same soap opera format as Bleak House, the BBC's last major Dickens adaptation in 2005. An hour-long launch episode will be followed by 14 half-hour instalments.

Jones, who wrote Gavin and Stacey alongside James Corden, is also appearing in BBC1's forthcoming adaptation of Thomas Hardy novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles. She is also writing a Gavin and Stacey Christmas special.

Mackenzie Crook, who shot the fame in The Office and stars in current movie release Three and Out, has also signed up to Little Dorrit. He plays office raconteur Harris, while Being Human's Claire Foy will take the lead as Amy Dorrit.

Tom Courtenay will play her father, while James Fleet, whose credits include The Vicar of Dibley and Four Weddings and a Funeral, will star as Amy's uncle, Frederick Dorrit. Amanda Redman has also been signed up, playing Mrs Merdle, while Lord of the Rings' Andy Serkis will appear as French villain Rigaud. Doctor Who's Freema Agyeman will also appear as Tattycoram.

Filming on the drama begins this week and will continue throughout the summer in locations in and around London, Buckinghamshire, Kent and Herefordshire. Made in-house by the BBC, Little Dorrit will be executive produced by Sense and Sensibility's Anne Pivcevic with Lisa Osborne producing.

Kate Harwood, head of BBC series and serials, said: "We are very proud to be presenting this wonderful line up of cast who will be bringing to life one of Dickens' broadest range of characters in a gripping, witty and touching script by the inimitable Andrew Davies. Part murder mystery, part love story, and wholly entertaining, Little Dorrit promises to be an autumn treat."

The Invisibles- fun to make, less so to watch

Anthony Head, Warren Clarke and Jenny Agutter, the stars of BBC1's new criminal comedy drama The Invisibles, tell Michael Deacon about the worst crimes they've ever committed (not including appearing in this show)...

On The Invisibles, BBC1’s new comedy drama series, Anthony Head plays Maurice, a retired criminal genius with a dazzling history of heists. Head, it turns out, once staged a daring heist himself. Although it wasn’t quite on Maurice’s scale. ‘When I was about 10 I went to a friend’s party,’ he says. ‘We hopped over his garden fence and found this lock-up which was filled with table tennis balls. We went, “Wow, fantastic!” and filled our pockets. God knows what we were going to do with them – I didn’t play table tennis.’ Afterwards he proudly showed his parents his ill-gotten booty. Livid, they made their sheepish son return all the balls at once. ‘I learnt my lesson,’ Head says wryly.

His co-stars on The Invisibles aren’t much more villainous. The most heinous crime Warren Clarke (who plays Maurice’s sidekick Syd) has ever committed was failing a breathalyzer test in the late Sixties, for which he was given a one-year driving ban and a £15 fine. Dean Lennox Kelly (who plays Hedley, a younger crook who idolises Maurice and Syd) was thrown out of his local park as a boy for firing at passers-by with a pea-shooter.

Not the most intimidating rogues, then. But then, neither are their characters in The Invisibles. The premise is simple. Ageing Maurice and Syd, their criminal days long behind them, are returning to Britain to live as neighbours in a quiet coastal village in Devon, after years in Spain enjoying the spoils of their crimes. But when Syd’s feckless son runs up a huge debt, the two decide that the only way to help him pay it off is to try one more heist. They find, though, that they aren’t quite the master criminals they once were.

‘Basically they’re too old to run,’ says Clarke, who played Dalziel in BBC1’s long-running police drama Dalziel & Pascoe. ‘That’s the funny side of it. They’re trying to climb buildings and run and jump – and it’s not as easy as it used to be.’ It wasn’t easy for Clarke (who’s 61) and Head (54), either. ‘For one scene I had to run after a lorry,’ says Head, who’s perhaps best known for his roles in Little Britain and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. ‘I didn’t recover for two weeks.’

Fans of New Tricks should feel at home watching The Invisibles. Both are family-friendly BBC1 comedy dramas about crime (except that in New Tricks the heroes are detectives rather than criminals). Both feature a largely middle-aged cast. Both carry the same central theme: that, although the middle-aged heroes may not be as fit as they once were, they’re still capable of succeeding in the end.

William Ivory, who wrote The Invisibles, admits that he likes New Tricks – but that a bigger inspiration was another popular comedy drama series: ITV’s Minder, which he himself used to write in the early Nineties.

‘Minder was a show about character, and the comedy all came from character,’ he says. ‘If people buy into your characters’ world enough, you don’t need to plot hysterically – you can just put them in simple situations. In the last episode of this series, they get stuck in a house together – and because the characters are good, it’s funny.’

Though criminals, the main characters are loveable. This is partly because they aren’t violent, partly because they steal only from very rich firms, and partly because they’re so winningly enthusiastic, even when they screw up. The hapless-but-hopeful Syd, Ivory says, was inspired by the bunglings of a petty criminal he used to play football with: ‘I remember once he couldn’t play for about eight weeks because he’d kicked in the plate-glass window of a shop – and the glass dropped down on his leg and practically took his foot off. He hadn’t quite thought it through – but a great enthusiast.’

The comedy doesn’t just come from pratfalls, though – there’s also observational humour, says another of The Invisibles’ stars, Jenny Agutter (who plays Maurice’s patient wife Barbara). ‘I’m sure a lot of people will recognise the domestic arguments,’ she says. ‘Things that aggravate, petty jealousies, stuff about where the toothpaste is.’

Viewers will recall the role that made Agutter’s name: playing Bobbie in the 1968 TV adaptation of The Railway Children when she was 16. Even today, she says, men of a certain age stop her in the street to tell her that she was their first ever crush when they were boys.

Among her admirers, it turns out, is her new screen husband. ‘Of course I had a crush on her,’ says Anthony Head. ‘And not just for The Railway Children; Logan’s Run, it went on and on. I thought it might get in the way…’

In the last couple of years, then, he’s got to kiss Jenny Agutter – and star in Little Britain opposite a naked David Walliams. Which experience was the more exciting? ‘It’s a hard one,’ he says drily. ‘I think I’d probably have to say Jenny Agutter. I hope that David isn’t too disappointed.’

* * *

Caitlin Moran thinks she knows why projects such as The Invisibles exist. And in almost every respect, they exist for positive reasons. They exist, she says, because of civilisation. A certain amount of drama has to be made every year, the rationale goes. Why not, then, ensure the bit of drama you're making that year is a very civilised affair? Let other dramas bring together actors throwing 3am tantrums about “integrity”. Let differing ventures tackle scripts that redefine the nature of storytelling, after turning the writers into gibbering, bald alcoholics. Let Robin Hood get shot in a hedge in Hungary, in the sleet, 3,000 miles from the nearest Carluccio's.

Instead - like Kingdom, Doc Martin and Jam and Jerusalem before it - The Invisibles says to its all-star cast, in a very reasonable way: “Hey guys. Guys! We've all been in this business a long time. By any measure, we've earned our chops. Let's shoot something very simple, by the seaside, with nice, long lunch-breaks. How about Devon? Chilled chablis and seafood. I'll even write complimentary cashmere sweaters for everyone into the script." We can totally understand it. As a great fan of almost any pleasant situation, I wholeheartedly applaud how very nice the whole thing must have been to make (physical exertions aside). There cannot be too much loveliness in this world. I'm all gung-ho for gorgeousness. The only problem is, it can make for decidedly unremarkable drama. In places, The Invisibles feels almost Eldorado - that unmistakable feeling that you should be watching it at 4pm, on ITV - and not, as in the case of both, wholly sober, on prime-time BBC One.

In a nutshell, Warren Clarke and Anthony Head are two former “high-class” burglars, who have just spent the past 20 years “going straight”, and turning very orange, in Spain. Returning to Britain, and a sleepy Devon fishing village, at the behest of Head's wife, Jenny Agutter, “the boys” find a reason to go back to their “old ways” within ten minutes. This then cues up a whole series of comedy-drama amusement, based around two OAPs pulling off “big jobs” while complaining about how much their backs hurt, how things used to be different in the old days, and how they'd love a sit down, a cup of tea and a Werther's etc.

Obviously, it could be quite amusing. But the whole thing trots along at a very odd pitch. The primary “Eh?”-prompter is their sidekick, Denzil from Only Fools and Horses (Paul Barber), who functions as the technical side of their operation. Indeed, such is the low effort of The Invisibles' script it's genuinely surprising that he isn't actually called “Techno”. He runs a bafflingly high-spec operation from his retirement villa at the edge of the village - sending encrypted police data to Head and Clarke's mobiles at the press of a button. Reception issues - such as the fact that, in every Devon fishing village I've been to, one has to stand on a bench merely to send a text, let alone upload video film from CTU in 24 - seem neither here nor there.

In addition to this, there comes the problem of Head. While Warren Clarke turns in a solid performance as some manner of loveable-but-dim sidekick - think John Prescott in a balaclava, crashing the getaway vehicle with the words “I only need my glasses when my eyes are tired!” - Head is a slightly ... less sturdy lead. Spending more than half his time engaged in angry Cockney shouting, saying plot-establishy things such as “We've 'ung up our boots! Forgeddit!”, Head unfortunately suffers from rampant, recurring Accent Slide.

At times, it becomes so acute he appears to be taking part in some manner of Accent Pentathlon - one that features the events “Angry Mitchell Brother”, “Someone a Bit Posh”, and “Anthony Newley, Slightly Pissed”. One wonders why the writers insisted he be an angry wideboy. The entire show wouldn't be affected one whit if they'd looked at the character synopses, crossed out “angry wideboy”, and written “Giles from Buffy” instead. Still, it adds another fact to humanity's sum total knowledge: Anthony Head cannot do angry Cockneys. We will know that for ever, now.

Alas, millions of people having to watch something as average as The Invisibles is far too high a price to pay for this information. It is best that you let me shoulder this burden alone. In a civilisation, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. We need to keep things pleasant.

The Invisibles is on BBC1 on Thursday, 1 May at 9.00pm

How Jane lost her Darcy

It is an irony universally acknowledged that the writer of 'Pride and Prejudice' died a spinster. But a TV drama shows why we should not pity her, says James Rampton...

Playing Jane Austen can seriously damage your health. That, at least, is the worry of Olivia Williams. The actress is portraying the author in Miss Austen Regrets, a one-off BBC1 drama that explains why the novelist died a 41-year-old spinster, having failed to meet her own Mr Darcy. In a break between scenes on set at Hall Barn, an appropriately stately manor house near Beaconsfield, the 39-year-old actress confides that she's fearful of the consequences if Austen's legions of passionate fans – the "Janeites" – take against her portrayal of their heroine. "It's a terrifying prospect," Williams shudders. "These diehard Janeites will pelt me with rock cakes if I make a mistake. Already, they're complaining online – 'She's too tall, she doesn't look right!'"

But Miss Austen Regrets, to be broadcast on 27 April, won't lack for authenticity; it is the fruit of months of meticulous research by Gwyneth Hughes. The writer, who penned last year's acclaimed BBC1/HBO thriller Five Days, says the screenplay is so closely tied to Austen's own words that she almost feels she should split the writing credit.

"The script is based on Austen's surviving letters to her sister and to her young niece Fanny. So I must share the credit for quite a lot of the dialogue with Miss Austen herself," Hughes says. "And I must say, it's been a strange and humbling experience to feel this genius of English literature peering critically over my shoulder as I write. But I have loved every minute in her company."

Hughes's script – the latest contribution to the burgeoning industry of Austen-related films (Becoming Jane, The Jane Austen Book Club) – dances a gavotte around the subject of marriage. Apparently happily unmarried as her 40th birthday looms, Jane lives in straitened circumstances with her mother (Phyllida Law) and sister Cassandra (Greta Scacchi) in Hampshire.

Her beloved young niece, Fanny (Imogen Poots), asks the author to run the rule over her potential husbands, prompting Jane to look back in melancholy on her own suitors. Her memory alights on the ones that got away; in a flashback, we see that when the author was 27, a rich neighbouring landowner, Harris Bigg-Wither (Samuel Roukin), proposed to her. She initially accepted, but after a long dark night of the soul, the next day she turned him down. The rejection condemned her family to live in genteel poverty, and her mother never let her forget it.

Jane reflects wistfully on the fact that this episode put her off the very idea of marriage. Consequently, she never settled down with her soulmate, the Reverend Brook Bridges (Hugh Bonneville), a clergyman who could wait no longer and ended up marrying someone else. It is a poignant tale of missed opportunities.

The makers of Miss Austen Regrets say this story was just crying out to be made into a drama. "If people only know one thing about Jane Austen, it's that she never married," says Anne Pivcevic, the producer, who was also responsible for BBC1's recent Sense and Sensibility. "It's fascinating that this woman who wrote so extensively about marriage and love with such perception and humanity never married. So when we discovered that at the age of 27 she actually had a proposal, which she rejected, we thought that was very fertile ground for drama.

"Harris had a marvellous house and a lot of acres, so for Jane to turn him down was a scandal at the time. But in the drama we explore the idea that it was a definite choice to rebuff Harris. She refused him because she did not truly love him – that's a theme that resonates throughout her novels. She remained unmarried as a choice, not out of bitter disappointment. The word 'spinster' denotes a victim – it's never used in a positive sense. But in Jane's letters, we found an incredibly affirmative voice, someone who knew her own mind.

"Yes, Harris was very rich and would have ensured her family's security, but Jane simply wasn't willing to compromise. She was an independent woman who was determined to live by her own lights. Jane remains an iconic figure to us because she made 21st-century choices in the 19th century," Pivcevic says.

Olivia Williams, the mother of two young daughters, three-year-old Esme and Roxanna, one, is sitting on the exquisitely manicured lawn of Hall Barn, a country house that would not look out of place on the cover of a Penguin Classic. Set dressers fuss round us hanging lanterns from the topiary for the next scene – the inevitable country ball sequence.

The actress was first spotted on an audition tape by Kevin Costner and invited to co-star with him in The Postman, her Hollywood breakthrough. She has gone on to feature in The Sixth Sense, Rushmore and Friends, and can currently be seen in the film Flashbacks of a Fool.

Williams ponders why Jane rejected Harris. "People's lives aren't planned," she muses. "They're just a random series of more or less faltering cock-ups. Jane was not some Virginia Woolf-style, proto-feminist heroine asserting, 'I want to be on my own.' She was not a bluestocking. She loved order and wanted very much to be within the parameters of acceptable society. The problem was that she didn't fit into it. She fully intended to, but she was so sharp and bright, she didn't slot in."

The actress, who played Jane Fairfax opposite Kate Beckinsale in the 1996 version of Emma, adds: "Clearly, the novelist had very strong views about female behaviour, but she wasn't a rebel. She just kept being too clever and overstepping the mark. She kept telling it like it is – she couldn't help herself.

"She didn't settle for Harris because she didn't love him enough. She wasn't some sloppy romantic – she was practical. She understood what my mum always used to say to me: that being married and having kids is really tough. It's bearable if you love the other person, but if you don't, it's unbearable. Jane knew that, but I still think she was gutted not to have found a husband."

Even if these events saddened Austen as a woman, they enriched her as a writer. Her life bled into her work. In 'Persuasion', for instance, she writes wryly that "a woman of seven and twenty can never hope to feel or inspire affection again".

Pivcevic agrees that "Austen's life informed her work. She wrote about the very difficult practice of getting to the altar. Her own love affairs had a very rocky road, and that is reflected in the novels. Look at poor Marianne in 'Sense and Sensibility'. She plumbs the depths. Heartache and misunderstandings abound, and she nearly dies on the way to the altar. But, in contrast to her own life, Austen's heroines always get there in the end – ultimately, she always gives them both love and money."

Austen's bittersweet experiences endowed her novels with a rare astringency. "One's impressions from screen adaptations of Austen is that it's all lovely girls running down hills in flowery dresses," Williams says. "But Austen could be a real bitch as well. She could nail the weaknesses in someone's appearance or accent. She could deconstruct people accurately and uncharitably, and would rail against their faults and foibles. That's why I – and the vigilante Janeites – love her."

Some 200 years after her death, Austen continues to inspire devotion not only from the Janeites but from the public at large. 'Pride and Prejudice', for instance, topped a poll of "The Books that Changed Your Life" on Radio 4's Woman's Hour. So why does Austenmania rage on?

Williams, who studied English at Cambridge University, says: "I'm in awe of Austen. She is the reason I've never written anything. I remember trying to write like her once and coming up with these clearly risible attempts to plot or describe things as brilliantly as she does."

The actress, who says she never goes anywhere without Austen's letters, pinpoints what makes her such a cherished novelist. "She writes with the perspicacity of someone who can see people for what they really are. She knows how to keep you on your toes. And out of that come these perfectly structured love stories. I also love the fact that her heroines have imperfections. Everyone reading her books thinks, 'There's hope for me. Even though my best friend is the most beautiful woman in the room, I could still get the gorgeous man in the end!'"

Greta Scacchi takes up the theme. "Austen is eternally popular because she writes wish-fulfilment stories. In the end, her characters get what they want. On the surface, her novels seem archaic – the whole elaborate story leads up to the moment of the first kiss and there is no exploration of what happens afterwards. And yet Austen's work throws up universal questions that are as relevant today as they were in her time: is this the right man? Is there such a thing as true love?"

Austen will always strike a chord because the ideas she addresses will always preoccupy us – love and marriage. Williams, who has been married to the actor Rhashan Stone since 2003, laughs: "It was looking pretty ropey for me at one point. I was 35 when I got together with my husband – that's another reason why I thought I understood Jane's predicament.

"We all know women who – dreadful phrase – have left it too late. It's common in our generation. So I didn't waste my time. I'd known my husband for ages, but once we hooked up, it was less than a year before we got married – 'Quick, find me a priest.' Marriage was a state of being I wanted to be in. Again, I think I comprehended how Jane must have felt."

It is an irony Austen herself might have appreciated that, while the writer may have suffered for her principles, we benefited immeasurably from them. Williams thinks that spinsterhood actually enhanced Austen's authorial skills. "I've recently had my second child, and I know that anything that can be cut out of your life is cut out of your life when you get married and have children. If Jane had got married, her writing would have been the first thing to go. It's selfish of us to be grateful if she was unhappy being a spinster, but our consolation is that she was able to write these wonderful books."

With a mischievous smile, Williams adds: "I'm not saying that Jane would have preferred to be on her own, but thank God she was!"

Miss Austen Regrets is on BBC1 at 8pm on Sunday 27 April

TV face-off

It's a TV face-off: can Precious Ramotswe see off He Kills Coppers? ponders Caitlin Moran...

Ooooh, it's a drama war between the BBC and ITV1! On the same day, in the same time slot, we have He Kills Coppers v The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency! How flattering of the big broadcasters, to presume that, instead of spending Sunday night looking for talking cats on YouTube, what we really want is some classy drama, which we will appreciate, because we are cultured, and dead posh, and eat sandwiches with a knife and fork. Off a plate.

As it turns out, you don't need to be posh at all for The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. You could be eating cornflakes off the floor with your face for all it demands of you. Whenever you see the credit “adapted by Richard Curtis”, you know you are unlikely to wander into an hour of killer replicants, Jungian dream sequences and random narrative time shifts. And, sure enough, The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency is, like the book that spawned it, “charming”. It's all “lovely shots of giraffes in the bush” this, and “people quoting old African proverbs at each other while drinking rooibos tea on the veranda” that. And endless amounts of “Jill Scott as Precious Ramotswe, being a warm-hearted, maverick woman” the other. It might as well be called the “We Love Jill Scott's Gentle Eyes and Indomitable Spirit Show”.

In fact, if you put aside the faintly incongruous side-plot about witchcraft and child sacrifice - I know! How unexpectedly and randomly dark! - then The No 1 Ladies' actually plays out like a Botswanan version of The Vicar of Dibley. Here's the “sturdy” Precious Ramotswe (Scott), breaking with all traditions and taking on a job (detective) that was previously the employ of men. Here's her slightly odd, socially maladroit sidekick (Anika Noni Rose as Grace Makutsi), whom she takes under her wing. Here's the village she moves to, full of both a) lovely scenery and b) eccentric, handily plot-generating local characters.

No wonder Curtis chucked his hat into the ring to adapt the book. Once the proper series starts - this is just the pilot - he can dig out a couple of old scripts, scribble out “Dibley” and “labrador” and replace them with “Gaborone” and “lion”, and then take the rest of the afternoon off. And why not? I like Curtis. I like his cheery films that believe in love. It's no crime to make warm, accessible, prime-time dramas - although from the amount of sniffy comments people have been making about The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, you'd think it was. And besides, it's scarcely like the pappy, artless Wild at Heart, but with some mysteries. This is a prime-time drama with an all-black cast, and cinematography by the sadly departed Anthony Minghella - you don't get too many of them to the pound. And it also has the year's best cameo so far - David Oyelowo as a musky, jivey, priapic stud-stoat practically writhing off the screen with glee. He needs to play a hyperactive sleazebag in tight trousers more often. He has a great talent. And the ladies will know what I mean when they watch it.

However, if you can bear to leave the warm, bath-like ease of The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, then do flick over to the categorically superior He Kills Coppers on ITV1 - not least for its opening monologue from Rafe Spall, which might be the most Cockney thing that's ever happened. I can't tell you how excitingly he delivers the phrase “Not that I gave a shit - I'm a bloody good thief taker, and I knew where I was going.” I've been trying to crowbar a poor impression into conversations all week. The children have taken it very badly.

He Kills Coppers is superior, feel-the-lining-on-this stuff - bafflingly good for ITV1. Spall is a low, sure, hypnotic note - a cocksure, slightly bent rookie detective in 1966; all fags, Brylcreem and tarts. The great casting continues with the mesmeric Kelly Reilly as a prostitute who is both fragile and brassily capable: a certain kind of working-class girl you got in “the olden days”, who was a feminist before feminism was invented. Alas, the retro detailing seems to extend to the sound-mix, which seems to have been done through a single mono loudspeaker in 1966 - whole swaths of dialogue are inaudible. But if you have subtitles on your TV, this is definitely the winner of the Sunday Night Drama Stand-Off.

The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, Easter Day, BBC One, 9pm; He Kills Coppers, Easter Day, ITV1, 9pm

Further reading: Jill Scott is the soul of a gumshoe; Precious Ramotswe: a very special investigator; The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency

He Kills Coppers

The latest TV adaptation of a Jake Arnott novel takes viewers back to a notorious Sixties killing reports James Rampton...

For David Bowie, everything about crime novelist Jake Arnott's work is hunky dory. The musician comments that, "whenever he's got a new book out, I drop everything, knowing that the next couple of hours are going to be pure gangland bliss." Like Bowie, TV producers tend to drop everything when a new Arnott novel comes out. Following on from the acclaimed BBC2 dramatisation of The Long Firm in 2004, ITV1 is now bringing to the screen a three-part interpretation of He Kills Coppers, Arnott's next slice of "pure gangland bliss."

Adrian Shergold's absorbing, beautifully-shot drama spans 20 years. Adapted by Ed Whitmore, previously responsible for Hallam Foe and Waking the Dead, the serial kicks off in 1966 London and is set against the backdrop of the celebrations for England's World Cup victory. (Further episodes take place in 1971 and 1985). The period is immaculately recreated – everyone smokes and smears on Brylcreem like it's going out of fashion and, at one point, a character walks past a poster on a wall that says "Drinka Pinta Milka Day".

The drama intertwines the stories of two morally ambiguous characters, career policeman Frank Taylor (played by Rafe Spall) and career criminal Billy Porter (Mel Raido). Taylor pursues Porter across the decades after Porter guns down three police officers, including Taylor's close friend and incorruptible colleague, Jonathan Young (Liam Garrigan). Taylor's distraught reaction on arriving at the scene of the triple murder is hauntingly filmed in slo-mo, to the plangent accompaniment of Dusty Springfield's If You Go Away.

I'm on the set of He Kills Coppers. It's a chilly morning and we're in a goods yard on the outskirts of Maidenhead where a traditional steam fair stores its attractions during the winter. Porter has been hiding out here with a group of travellers, and we're watching him paint a skull on the side of one of their fairground lorries.

In his caravan between scenes, Spall underlines that Arnott's writing readily lends itself to the screen. "He Kills Coppers is the only book I've ever read in one sitting. I literally couldn't put it down," enthuses the actor, who is also to be seen playing Dennis Heymer, the lover of Frankie Howerd (David Walliams), in BBC4's bio-pic, Frankie Howerd: Rather You Than Me. "Jake Arnott is a very special writer – he makes it look so easy. He has this beautiful, succinct, sexy style of writing that translates seamlessly to television. My favourite writer is Charles Bukowski, and he and Arnott have the same sparseness and clearness. Arnott is – for want of a better phrase – the best top-end pulp writer there is."

David Boulter, the producer of He Kills Coppers, chips in: "Arnott's writing is so rich. This is not only a thriller, it's a social chronicle that plays out over 20 years. This is a piece that transcends the boundaries of the crime genre. That's a really hard thing to do. But Arnott's characters are so believable that you completely forget you're in a crime drama and are drawn into a human drama instead. That's when it becomes truly compelling."

Arnott was inspired by the real-life case of Harry Roberts. In 1966, he and his accomplices shot dead three Met officers in the "massacre of Braybrook Street" in West London – still the worst peacetime slaughter of policemen in this country. Like Porter, Roberts was a veteran of the Malayan Emergency and used his military training to hide out in Epping Forest. Despite the largest manhunt in British police history, he escaped capture for three months. Roberts is still inside and is now one of the longest-serving prisoners in the UK.

A decade or so after Roberts's crime, Arnott was shocked to hear football hooligans taunting police with the terrace chant, sung to the tune of "London Bridge is Falling Down": "Harry Roberts is our friend, is our friend, is our friend. Harry Roberts is our friend, he kills coppers". The police had by the 1970s become so reviled that Roberts was transformed from cult demon to cult hero.

The film-makers say that, more than 40 years later, Roberts' crime still has the power to shock. "Even today," Boulter reflects, "if someone shot dead three police officers in cold blood and in broad daylight in Shepherd's Bush, there'd be a public outcry. In 1966, an era of far greater deference to the police, it was unthinkable. At the time, the rope had just been abolished, and Roberts was the first murderer not to swing.

"Roy Jenkins, the Home Secretary, had to explain to the public why he was not going to hang. Then football hooligans started to chant 'Harry Roberts is our friend,' in order to wind up the police and spark a riot. That moment, when Roberts was turned into a folk hero, really was a low point in our society."

He Kills Coppers also charts the changing nature of our relationship with the police between the 1960s and 1980s. Boulter, who has also produced Prime Suspect, The Forsyte Saga and EastEnders, continues that, "up until 1966, we had had this image of the police as Dixon of Dock Green, the friendly neighbourhood bobby on the beat. All that changed during the 1970s and 1980s.

"The nadir was reached when there was the Battle of Orgreave during the Miners' Strike in 1984 and then the Battle of the Beanfield the following year. That was when the police violently stopped a group of hippies getting to Stonehenge for a summer solstice party. It was a disgraceful day. I've seen the ITN footage from that clash, and it still makes me angry. Women holding infants were pulled off buses and beaten with truncheons. The police went way over the top. On the back of Orgreave, they were under Government orders to stop the peace convoy and stamp out civil disorder. That moment marked the death of the hippie dream.

"By that stage, the police had become an arm of the Thatcherite state. They had also become very militarised. They had dispensed with the theory of trying to control civil disorder peacefully and borrowed the technique from the Hong Kong Military Police of charging at demonstrators on horseback – as they did in the poll-tax riots. That period was when the public really lost confidence in the police. People thought that scenes like the Battle of the Beanfield could never happen in this country. They began to view the police as an army of occupation."

The other aspect of policing that He Kills Coppers highlights is the corruption that became endemic in the Met during the 1970s and 80s. On his first day in the Flying Squad, Taylor is forced by his senior officer to accept a bribe from a gangster. Taylor's boss explains the way it works to the new boy: "We keep the peace and we take a few heavy villains off the pavement every now and then, and the Great British Public sleep soundly in their beds. We deserve a little extra for that, don't we?"

Spall avers that, "in the early 1960s, the British public had an idealised view of the police. But during the 1970s, there was mass corruption throughout the Flying Squad and a load of officers were sacked. Those scandals fundamentally altered our view of the police."

The other area where Arnott excels is in creating immensely plausible characters. He succeeds in conjuring up the coppers and criminals who prowl the smoky Soho clip-joints of the mid-1960s without once straying into Guy Ritchie-style "geezer-land."

The Flying Squad high-flyer Taylor, for example, is not an upright, unimpeachable copper, but a highly questionable figure. As well as accepting bribes, he deceives his supposed best friend Young, steals his girlfriend, a prostitute called Jeannie (Kelly Reilly), and gets him transferred to a post where he gets murdered. As the drunken Taylor rides in a taxi through the jubilant Trafalgar Square crowds revelling in England's World Cup win, he sighs, in the hard-boiled voiceover without which no crime thriller is complete: "They're all singing 'You'll Never Walk Alone'. Do you want a bet? Everyone's happy, delirious. So what's wrong with me?"

Raido, who makes a complex, brooding villain, affirms that nothing is clear-cut in this story of an obsessive, potentially doomed quest for redemption. "There are no 'good' and 'bad' characters in He Kills Coppers – they're all just flawed human beings with their own shortcomings and virtues. One bad act does not define you as a human being. Billy, for instance, is not just a violent psychopath. There is another side to him that has feelings and is very tender towards women and loves art."

The 25-year-old Spall, whose father is Timothy, the star of Auf Wiedersehen Pet, Secrets and Lies and Pierrepoint, says that he is delighted to be appearing in a piece as thought-provoking as He Kills Coppers. "I'm living my dream," beams the young actor. "This is what I've always wanted to do."

The producers say that He Kills Coppers is part of ITV1's drive to produce more challenging drama – a development which Spall applauds. "It's great that ITV1 are doing it," the actor enthuses. "It's something that a few years ago, they wouldn't have done. I was surprised when I heard it was for ITV1. But, then again, in the past couple of years they have made some really brave dramas. Look at Pierrepoint. That was great – although I can't remember who the lead was. Some actor or other!"

He Kills Coppers starts on ITV1 at 9pm on Sunday