Lockdown, Lowdown… A Closer Look at the BBC TV Show Waking The Dead

By Donald “Braveheart” Stewart

Whilst we all have favorite characters, some of us also have favorite actors. I cannot see past a dose of Jimmy Nesbit and the rise of the Cumber Bitches is quite interesting but looking way back to the career of Trevor Eve, he was always Eddie Shoestring to me.

Until he was Boyd, Peter Boyd. From Waking the Dead.

There is an iconic part of the first episode of waking the Dead, which was shot in a rubbish dump. Apparently, the stench of the dump was really beginning to irritate the actors as they stood delivering their lines. It did not feel like an auspicious start for the mercurial character of Boyd to rally his troops together, but it was pitch perfect. Their role was to be to dig up long forgotten cases, to delve into the story books and make good the mistakes of the past – to literally wake up the dead and make the living account for their actions.

It was televisual gold. A visual metaphor for the future that was simply masterful.

It was helped by an exceptional cast. As well as the iconic Eve, it had Sue Johnston, Claire Goose, Wil Johnson, Holly Aird, Esther Hall and Felicite Du Jue alongside Tara Fitzgerald, Stacey Roca and Eve Birthistle. They became faces if not names etched in our conscience as they provided an exceptional piece of TV drama.

The premise was simple.

This was a cold case unit in London. There were detectives, a profiler and a forensic pathologist who would be deployed to sort out the long forgotten troublesome past of the police force. It could be well in the past, a claim of miscarriage of justice or just the idle curiosity of one person on the team which led to a full scale investigation. Nine series, forty six stories and an international Emmy along the way in 2004, it had all begun at that rubbish tip in 2000 and completed in 2011. It spawned a spin off – The Body Farm – following the forensic scientist, Evel Lockhart (Tara Fitzgerald) which ran for only one series.

It even had a prequel for radio which was its equal aurally, though Anthony Howell took the role of Peter Boyd.

Episodes were split over two nights – both were an hour long – and we therefore got enough time to delve into the psyche of the team – particularly the mercurial lead Peter Boyd. He was a complex man who held the team with finesse and with troubled, often infantile tantrums. His foil in the drama – psychologist Grace Foley (Sue Johnston) matched him throughout the series for his wit, charm and dedication. She could see his faults and his values.

Changes in the cast were handled fluidly though the death of junior DC Mel Silver (Claire Goose) was as spectacular as it was surprising. It led to a story arc over two series that worked exceptionally well. It was a triumph of storytelling. The arrival of her body, onto a car being driven to attend her call for backup was one of the dramatic highlights of the series.

It was also a show unafraid of difficult storylines, often tackling sensitive issues of its time. We got the fanaticism in religion, the British involvement in the Iraq War, Boyd’s own dealing with anger management, of the loss of his son, Foley’s cancer diagnosis and one of the team being shot by a police colleague. War crimes, child sexual abuse, criminal banking, racism – the list went on and showed the tensions in the team as a microcosm of the tensions within British politics at the time. It was exceptionally well written and nuanced.

But it ran out of its time and the end, which involved, as many finales do, a fairly convoluted sense of itself, saw the politics of the police begin to infect its working. The time had come for the monolith of the Force, to force the end of the unit. Boyd was ready for promotion or for retirement and the unit and the series was ready to fold. Unlike Silent Witness, the BBC were to retire the idea, not replace the lead cast, and unlike Spooks we were only going to get the televisual feats and not a film version.

Of its time, ironically, it was close to cutting edge and having rewatched the whole thing one more time, it stands up well to scrutiny. It is one of the few series I would still go back to, to sample single episodes as I think it has strength in its format, performances and the writing.

It’s still the treat I remember. And what the BBC, when it is on its game, really does well.

British television is a curious affair. Begun through the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) it is funded through the universal license fee. In essence, if you wanted to watch the television , you had to pay the license fee. The BBC got it all and is state run, albeit at arms-length. Then came along commercial television in the form of the Independent Television (ITV) in 1955. Designed to bring a bit of competition to the BBC, it was paid for through advertising but still free to air… well they didn’t add another license fee to it. By the time that I was born, 1965, there was BBC1, BBC2 and ITV. And that was it. It was still years before Bruce Springsteen would moan that there were 55 channels and nothing on but here in the UK, we kept this going until in 1982, we added a fourth channel and in 1997, a fifth. With sparkling imagination, they were called Channel Four and ehm Channel Five… In between came Sky and we understood what Springsteen meant. And so, my childhood and leading up to early adulthood we had three options… But the programms made were exceptionally good. And so, here is some critical nostalgia as the lockdown has brought a plethora of reruns, new formats and platforms and old classics trying to make their way back into our consciousness as broadcasters flood their schedules with classics… or are they classics at all? Let me take you through an armchair critics’ view of what we have to see, to find out… Welcome to the Lockdown Lowdown…

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