By Julie Waters
BANGOR’S favourite literary son, Colin Bateman, makes a welcome return to the nation’s television screens with his new four part psychological thriller Dead and Buried next week.
The former County Down Spectator deputy editor is no stranger to the silver screen’s bright lights with a string of film and television hits under his writing belt.
However the award winning novelist found himself on the other side of the camera yesterday when The BBC One Show’s presenter Angela Rippon interviewed him in his former Bangor newsroom ahead of the show’s premier.
Against the backdrop of a busy deadline day, Colin, who began his career at the Spectator at the tender age of 16, gave readers a valuable insight into his new series that is set to air on Monday night, September 2.
The thriller stars actor Annabel Scholey as Cathy, who encounters Michael, played by actor Colin Morgan, the man convicted of her brother’s brutal murder 15 years earlier.
Retraumatised by her past, Cathy instigates a clandestine relationship with the man she despises, embarking on a campaign of harassment and deceit.
With exclusive screenings of the first episode at Bangor’s Court House, and in Armagh and Dublin, Colin has enjoyed seeing the audiences’ reactions first hand.
He said: “With television you very rarely get to watch with an audience, so it has been fantastic to see people react. It has gone down very well and I hope people will tune in and enjoy it – we might even get a second series.”
Colin explained how the project went from a one woman play to a four part TV series saying: “Dead And Buried was originally a BBC Radio 4 short story called The Gaining of Wisdom.“
“It then became a one woman play called Bag for Life for the Playhouse Theatre in Londonderry before finally becoming this four part TV series. So it has been a 10 year journey, things happening very slowly and then it was written very quickly towards the end of last year and then filming in January.”
Explaining the inspiration behind Dead and Buried, Colin said: “It was examining something that does happen all the time here.
“If someone has crossed us in some way or harmed your family or, in the worst case scenario, killed someone and gone to prison for it and then you bump into them as they have served their sentence,how do you react?
Said Colin: “Most of us encounter people who have done some wrong to us and may have revenge fantasies. You aren’t always able to turn the other cheek and do want to harm them but because we are civilised we don’t act on it.
“In this story, the main character encounters a man who killed her brother and she can’t help but react. She starts off in a way we all do with looking at the internet but she becomes kind of obsessed and it spirals out of control.”
He explained the drama is set along the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, with the action moving back and forth.
Said Colin: “When we’re in quite a small community, the chances of you meeting people who’ve affected your life from the past is so much greater. And that’s what happens with Cathy and Michael, so that when they do finally meet, it sets off an explosive response.
“Dead And Buried is a psychological thriller. It’s quite dark, quite funny and it’s going to be intriguing for the audience because they have to work out who to trust because there are so many red herrings, and you’re not quite sure what Cathy’s up to or whether Michael is truly a reformed character, or if he still retains his capacity for violence.”
Colin highlighted the challenges of writing the story for television compared to the theatre. “I love writing for the theatre and getting a different audience response every night but you are necessarily limited by budgets and settings and the size of your cast.
“Writing a television version allowed me to really open up the story, introduce many new characters and really take it in many new directions while still remaining faithful to the original idea. It still asks the basic question, what would you do if you were in this situation?”
As to whether Colin would seek revenge if he found himself confronted with an enemy from the past, he said: “I think everyone has these fantasies, but luckily we very rarely act on them. But imagine how amplified those thoughts would be if they related to a really serious crime?
“I know when I staged the original play, lots of people in Derry came up to me and said they’d been in that exact position, bumping into people who’d had violent acts against their loved ones, and being powerless to do anything about it, and they were traumatised as a result.”
