Darkness In The North Of England

The revolution may never be televisied, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be a televisual revolution. This month sees the release of the complete Seasons 1 & 2 Twin Peaks box set, a series that, 20 years after its premiere, remains a benchmark in modern small-screen drama. You don’t need me to bang on at length here about David Lynch and Mark Frost’s masterful weaving of weird mystical noir and Jimmy Stewart Americana, its Peyton Place-on-acid multiple plotlines and Zen surrealism. Without it there may have been no X-Files, no Millennium, Sopranos, Lost, The Wire, or Deadwood.
But the revolution is not exclusively American cable property. The other week your correspondent rescued a copy of the Red Riding series from the bargain bin, and it may be the darkest and most daring British TV show since Edge Of Darkness. First screened by Channel 4 last year, and released in US cinemas two months ago, it comprises three individual but interconnected 90-minute films shot by different directors (Anand Tucker, James Marsh and Julian Jarrold), all written by Tony Grisoni, adapted from The Damned United author David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet, four novels that cover the period 1974 to 1983, set against a backdrop of serial murders, including the Yorkshire Ripper case.
Peace envisioned the books as ‘an occult history of the North’, his riposte to Ellroy’s LA Quartet. They have come to be regarded as a milestone in British crime fiction, characterised by the writer’s furious pacing and staccato prose style, depicting complex webs of corruption.
Grisoni has done an enviable job in translating Peace’s stories to the screen. The films rejoice, if that’s the word, in grimy period atmospheres, and feature outstanding turns from Andrew Garfield as a reckless young Yorkshire Post reporter, Sean Bean as the crooked businessman John Dawson (arguably his finest performance to date), and Paddy Considine as Peter Hunter, a Manchester man brought in to assess the West Yorkshire Police’s investigation of the Ripper murders. Columbia pictures have bought the rights to adapt the novels and series into a theatrical film, and have been
negotiating with Ridley Scott to direct. We await the outcome with interest.