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Fools, horses and two popular British detectives as an 11th series of BBC1’s long-running Dalziel & Pascoe is ready for an autumn launch
T he sun was beating down relentlessly during this
past summer’s prolonged heat wave as a pair of ele- gantly-suited senior police- men looked a little incon- gruous – and decidedly
par-boiled – amid the informal bustle of a busy racing stables.
It was another case for the rather unlikely partnership of Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel
(Warren Clarke) and
Detective Inspector Peter Pascoe (Colin Buchanan) as they investigated chicanery in the world of horse racing.
Fallen Angel is the second
film in five new cases for
Dalziel & Pascoe, marking the eleventh series of the award-
winning production, which
began a decade ago under the auspices of BBC Birmingham.
The characters themselves –
the politically incorrect, rather uncouth Dalziel and the sensi-
tive, intellectual Pasco - were
first introduced in 1970 by novelist Reginald Hill and have re-appeared in more than 16 books since then.
Before the BBC finally latched on to the pair in 1996 and began to achieve ratings of, on occasion, more than nine million viewers, there had been a brief ITV foray – for just three episodes – two years earlier with comedians Hale and Pace as the mis- matched cops.
Now Clarke and Buchanan, who have also both directed episodes of the long-running production, seem almost indivisible from their colourful characters who investigate heinous goings-on in and around the fictional Yorkshire town of Wetherton.
Directed by Ian Knox, the second of the first two films in this latest sea-
son, was actually on location in Midlands racing country off the M42 and features Cheryl Campbell and ex- Coronation St actor Sean Wilson among the usual suspects in a typi- cally convoluted two-part, two-hour tale of death and mayhem leavened with dry wit.
Supervising, quite literally, the whole show is current series producer Ann (but known more generally as
you think a BBC hour is about 59 min- utes as opposed to ITV’s 45 minutes, that’s a lot more to get through. They are complicated stories, difficult to write and do.
“You drive out to a location never quite knowing what will happen: it might be wonderful or a disaster. Each day is always different, never boring and certainly not predictable.”
Cinematographer Peter Thornton would agree with that. After cutting his D&P teeth on an episode directed by Paul Marcus in series 10, he was invited back (“so I must have done something right”) for the latest batch of which he has, to date, lit the first two that have just been aired on BBC 1. The next three will resume shooting later in the year. “I would love to do more,” he laughs, “but you never know until you’re actu- ally in the breakfast queue!”
Like Tricklebank, he is an alumnus of commercial televi-
sion including numerous episodes of another venerable crime thriller series, A Mind To Kill, which used to be shot in English and Welsh.
Had he found it difficult coming into such a long-established operation as D&P? “No, not at all. Annie said when we first met that every episode is a film on its own, individually-made, and that there didn’t have to be a con- tinuity of style. Which is nice in theo- ry. Of course, the practice of today’s TV filming schedules is that you don’t always get the time to do exactly what you want. As for the two main actors, they are so easygoing and have a good sense of humour. No egos.
“On this, I brought in most of the camera crew and have got on very well with the gaffer and the sparks
‘Annie’) Tricklebank who has been involved with D&P since first working as a producer on the show in 2001.
A comparative newcomer to the BBC after spending all her formative years in ITV perhaps most notably on more than 80 episodes, from 1991- 1997, of Soldier Soldier, Tricklebank – whose husband Paul Brown edits D&P - describes herself as “very hands on, which means I’m here all the time as much as I can physically be if I’m not involved with editing or the music.
A lot of time is also spent with the writer and the script editor.
Dalziel & Pascoe is, she says, extremely intensive. “The five episodes, at two hours each, add up to 10 hours of TV which, all in all, take about nine months of the year. When
“I’m very impressed with
Eterna 500T, and the stocks mix so well together.”
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