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JANE HARDY INTERVIEW Daragh Carville
Jane Hardy
is a feature writer who has interviewed a few of the big names from Arlene Foster to Mrs Thatcher.
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BAY WATCH
Jane Hardy catches up with Daragh Carville as he discusses his hit TV show, The Bay, growing up in Armagh, and moving from terrible poems to great plays.
You might have thought Morecambe Bay, the eponymous seaside location of ITV’s hit show, The Bay, had joined fictional Midsomer and indeed Broadchurch as somewhere you wouldn’t want to live. High crime rate, murders and quite a lot of human misery in this beautiful Lancashire resort. Yet as its Armagh born creator and scriptwriter Daragh Carville reveals, the reverse is true. “Apparently the number of people looking at property here online has gone up by 70% since the first series.”
The TV drama began almost by chance, according to Carville who is speaking by Zoom from the study on the top floor of his period home in Morecambe Bay. It’s a room with a view, as he shows me later, inevitably revealing the distant sunlit bay. “I was thinking about crime drama and genre, such a crucial part of TV drama, and the kind of shows I love. The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, the French show Spiral, the UK show Happy Valley. There’s a common pattern - they’re all crime dramas but rooted in character, not simply procedural shows, although there’s nothing wrong with procedural dramas.”
Carville adds that these dramas provide the element he’s got from his background in Irish theatre and storytelling, an emphasis on the family. “I was starting to think of some sort of crime drama which balanced the high pressure working life of the police with the pressures and intensity of family life.” Then came the lightbulb moment, as Daragh explains: “I was listening to a report about a murder case and there was a statement read out on the steps of the courthouse on behalf of the family of the victim. They said they particularly wanted to thank the Family Liaison Officer; without her they wouldn’t have got through it intact.” As he says, at that moment things crystallised. He had his subject.
There were research meetings with Family Liaison Officers or FLOs as they’re known, set up by co-creator Richard Clark. Carville says: “There’s never been a police drama about this role. They have to be focussed and were really keen to say they’re not just there to pass the tissues. It takes a particular kind of human being to do this. They’re going into a family at a time of trauma and crisis and said: ‘We’re working detectives, here to solve the crime’. It’s a double role. Never in a million years would I volunteer for this job.”
Fast forward to one of the most controversial recent prime time starts to a crime series, prefaced with the necessary warning about adult content. With brilliant use of the TV writer’s friend, dramatic irony, we meet Lisa Armstrong on a karaoke girls’ night out, see the single mum enjoy a quickie in the alley behind the pub with an attractive guy. Then discover Sean is the father, in fact stepdad, of the missing teenage twins case DC Armstrong is assigned to.
It was visual, gripping, with not many words. Carville says, ‘No comment’ when asked about the sex scene. He goes on to note: “TV is show, not tell, something I teach as a lecturer at Birkbeck College. Theatre and screen are deeply connected but also fundamentally different. To boil it down a bit simplistically, you write theatre for the ear, TV, which started as silent cinema, for the eye. At the start of a script you avoid big talky scenes, you want to start on visual action. So you do a big splurgy draft then think, ‘What can we take out?’ I just hope the show has a voice of its own.”
One of the keys to The Bay’ success was Morven Christie’s pitch-perfect performance as Armstrong, single mother, cop, human being. Carville says they knew her star quality from the start. “I wasn’t totally involved in casting although I had a veto if I thought it was wrong. As soon as Morven started it was brilliant, exciting. She was empathetic, with her kids and her mum to look after; what’s that term, the sandwich generation?”
But the opening scene could have been even darker, as Carville reveals. The opener to series two, in which poor Stephen Tompkinson is despatched, after about a quarter of an hour, by a gunman on his doorstep, might have come earlier. While The Independent described this episode as ‘hackneyed’, viewers loved it. Carville says: “We could have started with that scene which is an archetypal beginning where violence comes so immediately into the household.” He admits that his Northern Irish background means he has experience of what violence looks like. “Yes, it is probably to do with growing up when I did.”
And of course, where. I ask Carville the cultural biggie: that is why Northern Ireland punches above its weight in the arts? He says: “That’s clearly true. When I was growing up in Armagh, I was very conscious of the history of the place and the arts, of poetry, not theatre although we had amateur dramatics. I was aware Paul Muldoon came from Armagh and John Montague.”
Daragh also had, as he puts it, the quintessential inspiring English teacher, one Paul McAvinchey. “He brought Seamus Heaney to meet us O Level English students. The fact this (great) writer was coming to our school wasn’t mysterious. As a human being, Heaney felt like a friend of your dad’s, approachable and warm.”
One of the reasons the arts flourished here has indirectly to do with the Troubles, according to Carville. “Growing up through the ‘70s and ‘80s in Armagh was a very difficult time. The city had the heart beat out of it – everything was shut down, including the Ritz Cinema. I don’t want to say we had to make our own entertainment but what didn’t shut down was the imaginative space. That’s how we escaped.”
He goes on to list other members of this creative generation: Brian Kirk, Seamus McGarvey, John Paul Connolly, Richard Dormer. “It’s a whole artistic generation, most of whom have ended up working on Game of Thrones.”
Daragh Carville sensed his career progression from an early age. “I was terrible at PE but I was good at art and English, so I knew that’s what I’d probably end up doing.” While at primary school, Carville started writing what he describes over-modestly as “terrible poems” before correcting himself. “I may be doing myself a disservice as I came second in the Patrick Kavanagh poetry competition. It was the Live Aid era and I wrote a poem about famine.” Pushed, he reveals the title: “It was called Famine and was as ridiculous as that suggests. But because we’d been taught Heaney and his half rhymes, I peppered it with them. So the judge probably thought this kid does slightly unusual things.”
Carville didn’t apply to Queen’s or Trinity or the University of Ulster like his mates, but went to the University of Kent, which had a drama-writing course. “I wrote things I thought you should write, as we were being taught by Marxists and the radical left, and played around with a thing about Greenham Common which was crap as I knew nothing about it.”
Later on, after good advice he found his voice and his brilliant career was launched. “A guy called Alan Beck said I should write something in the voice I grew up with. I wrote The Grandfather Grave, set behind our house in Cathedral Road.” Fortunately, the university had connections with the famous, radical Royal Court Theatre, London. “They came down to see what we were doing and I got a rehearsed reading at The Royal Court with proper actors performing my play in front of a live audience. It was intoxicating and I thought, I want to do this for the rest of my life.”
In 1996, Daragh Carville’s acclaimed drama Language Roulette played in a Tinderbox production in Belfast, also at The Bush and The Traverse and was seen in America and Prague. He’d done his time teaching English and working in restaurants but the theatre now beckoned. “It made a bit of an impact,” he notes modestly. In The Guardian, Lyn Gardner described Carville’s writing as “inspired” and Carville’s clever links between bar room fallings-out and the conflict beyond the pub door set him on course.
But in between the short stories, and serious plays for companies such as Tinderbox, Carville encompasses popular storytelling. As he says, “it’s all the same thing”.
Daragh Carville describes himself at one point as a fanboy. “I’m a fanboy when it comes to films and real pop music and was obsessive about Dylan and the Beatles.” He is definitely an enthusiast and talks about the reassurance the team gave to Morecambe Bay residents before filming The Bay. “We did a Q & A with people who said they hoped we weren’t going to show just the dark side. We didn’t flinch from the deprivation and the show starts with the death of a teenage boy. But at the risk of sounding like a luvvie, it was written from a place of love, with warmth.” He and wife, novelist Jo Baker, have made this place their home, with son Daniel (17) and daughter Aoife (13) who was born here.
When we talk, Daragh Carville says he’s been doing read-throughs for the third series. If the first dealt with working class Morecambe Bay, the second with middle class dysfunctional families (“in the leafy suburbs”) and the third is different again. “It’s the slight elephant in the room and I ought to say we’re heading for a series without Lisa Armstrong, and obviously with no Med.” He adds: “It’s a bit of a new beginning but with many of the same characters. We’re bringing in a new FLO, Jenn Townsend, played by Marsha Thomason. She’s very different from Lisa and is going to bring a whole new energy to the show. The new family is diverse with a BAME (black and mixed ethnic) background. I wondered if that was my story to tell so we’ve also brought in an Asian writer, Furquan Akhtar, who has written two episodes and is going to be a star.” The team will film this month with full COVID regulations. Carville says: “We were lucky before, compared to shows like Line of Duty that had to shut down. It’ll be a different kind of experience.”
What did Daragh buy when The Bay became a success? “Not a car, no, we’ve two kids and have to be sensible. A few more bottles of Prosecco.”
