Liam Trim, Site Manager opens up on ITV’s latest hit drama Broadchurch, starring a stoney-faced David Tennant. Series 2 has already been confirmed, but with a few residents already dearly departed and a seemingly conclusive finale, where can it go from here?
ITV’s Broadchurch was a strange beast. On the one hand, it was just another standard ITV drama. A police procedural (hardly original) following the murder of a child in a coastal Dorset town. On the other, it seemed kind of different.
There was a scope that isn’t usually there. The plot thrust its slow, plodding face into the homes of lots of characters, practically the whole community in fact. There was also a shiny gloss to everything that doesn’t normally grace British telly. Beaches were shot in beautiful ways and waves washed in cinematically. With such a gorgeously crafted stage, the drama seemed all the more important and doom laden.
And then there was the soundtrack, which I could describe as intrusive, but I’ll instead call ‘emotionally piercing’.
Obviously, on ITV there are ad-breaks. Writers and directors must get round these pesky, profit driven interruptions by creating natural cut off points in the narrative. At times, Broadchurch had these mini cliff-hangers that worked well. You’d rush your cup of tea to get back to the sofa (not that I watch TV like that, it’s the 21st century after all).
But it didn’t matter if the narrative didn’t flow seamlessly into a break. The soundtrack would simply put in an ominous, Inception-esque ‘bwaaam’ over a picturesque rural background to signal the transition. It did this a lot, not just before ad-breaks. It would pile on the tension and the suspicion, quite often at completely inappropriate moments. It would tell you what to feel, rather than guiding the emotions supplied by the story.
At other times though, the soundtrack worked brilliantly. Broadchurch was wonderfully hit and miss, addictively so. I’m convinced that was part of its mass appeal. Mostly though, people tuned in for the cast and the writing. David Tennant and Olivia Colman stole the show as the detectives but there were supporting turns from those in the victim’s family, as well as the journalists, shopkeepers and suspects.
Chris Chibnall, the writer behind the whole thing, also crafted a story with many layers, many possible suspects and lots of room for the actors to develop their characters, which seemed to draw people in.
Screen trivia for you: Chibnall, and the two directors who steered the episodes, have all worked on Doctor Who, and with Tennant’s central performance, plus Rory the Vicar, the show would appear to owe quite a debt to the BBC sci-fi programme.
And finally, as they say on the news, the Dorset accents must get a mention. As a born and bred Dorset resident, I was more intrigued than most by this aspect of the programme. Thankfully Tennant’s character didn’t require a Dorset twang but given his skill for accents in previous roles, he could probably have done a better job than many.
Colman, who has received bucket-loads of praise for her performance, delivers an awful caricature, as did the actors playing the grieving mother and father. Eventually though, the accents stopped bothering me, merely providing the occasional laugh. And I must admit, there are people in Dorset who sound like the residents of Broadchurch, but not all of us sound quite that country.
Anyway, the big question now that the phenomenally successful series has ended is what on earth has Chibnall got planned for Series 2? A second series is not just a possibility, it’s already confirmed by ITV, always desperate for a hit, bless ‘em.
Chibnall claims to have a ‘very different story’ to tell now that detectives Tennant and Colman have (seemingly) left the Broadchurch bubble. But what could that story be? Another murder surely wouldn’t work.
Here are my entirely serious, speculative guesses about Chibnall’s plan for Series 2…
1) Toxic barrels wash ashore and Broadchurch is quarantined, closed off from the outside world. Chibnall’s script probes human psychology under pressure, as the residents prepare to fall out and presumably fight each other to death for food. But everything turns out alright, when the Broadchurch residents realise that they never leave the town anyway.
2) Terrorists in speedboats turn up from France, where no one would let them in. Broadchurch proves much more accommodating for the freedom fighters. The residents struggle to reconcile their sympathy for the gunmen’s aims, and their fear of them. The final episode is a huge shootout, as armed police finally arrive from London after 8 weeks of slow plotting.
3) The town’s tech savvy vicar opens an internet cafe and slowly the whole town discover the joys of the web. The series takes a documentary approach, following the residents as they enter the modern world and start thriving businesses enabled by their internet skills.
4) One of the residents is an alien. We don’t know who. 8 episodes later we find out.
5) A child is killed. The residents decide that child murders are actually good business for the town, but an outsider working for The Jeremy Kyle Show exposes the cover up.
Liam Trim, Site Manager
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