If you catch the right flight from Los Angeles to London, it is possible to catch a glimpse of both Las Vegas and Blackpool from the sky. Three years ago I made such a flight just as Blackpool had announced its intention to become the home-grown version of Vegas. You didn’t need to be thousands of feet up to see the vaulting folly of this ambition. But it certainly helped.
Now, however, you can see for yourself from the sofa, because here comes Blackpool, a dazzling new BBC drama that is a must-visit highlight of the autumn. It tells of an arcade-owning impresario with the implausible name of Ripley Holden, who aims to grab Blackpool by its stick of rock and yank it into the big time. The only problem is that halfway through episode one a corpse turns up on his premises, leaving a further five-and-a-half episodes for his dream to unravel and a past to emerge that’s even shadier than his present.
Ripley comes in the form of a lushly sideburned David Morrissey, who makes a swaggering departure from the muted studies of coiled tension in such dramas as State of Play. “It’s new, it’s brave, it’s very original,” says Morrissey. “A really different thing for me. That’s the challenge: to find something that scares me and then run right into it.”
His nemesis, played by David Tennant, is a waggish out-of-town detective, the only person immune to the big man’s charm, unless you count Ripley’s wife (Sarah Parish), who herself is not immune to . . . well, that would be telling.
The scriptwriter Pete Bowker was acting upon several impulses when he embarked upon Blackpool. “I wanted to write about a contemporary monster whom we should like despite ourselves,” he says. “I also wanted to write something about northern seaside towns, and Blackpool in particular, because I spent all my childhood holidays there. About three years ago there was the first hint that liberalised gambling laws would be brought in to allow for large Vegas-style casinos. Blackpool latched on to this as part of its redevelopment plan. If you are going to make a larger-than-life individual, why not make him an arcade owner in Blackpool, and why not make him a man who thinks he’s on the cusp of a gold rush?” The reality is that, as long as stag and hen parties splatter the pavements outside pubs with a variety of fluids (some of them bodily) every weekend, Blackpool will never be Vegas — despite Tony Blair’s best efforts. But with this show’s help, it can have a damn good try. Ripley’s arcade is a many-splendoured dreamland, an endless enfilade of glittering slot machines among which the promise of wealth is on offer to all. One day during the making of the programme I visited the arcade. This was a shorter trip than expected: Blackpool’s glitziest gambling venue had been built from scratch in a studio in northwest London, because in reality a venue like this just doesn’t exist anywhere.
The other surprise came when I got there. John Thomson, who plays Ripley’s sidekick Terry, was in the middle of shooting a scene. Every time the director called “Action!” a blast of Alison Moyet’s Invisible emerged from somewhere while Thomson walked down a wide curving staircase, lipsyncing with gusto. Yes, Blackpool is the first British television drama for many years in which actors sing along to the soundtrack.
The “P” word will be on the lips of viewers old enough to remember The Singing Detective, as Blackpool’s production team knows only too well. “The first people to do this after Dennis Potter are always going to be compared with him,” says the producer, Kate Lewis. “That shows how scared we all were.” From Pennies from Heaven through to Lipstick on your Collar, Potter made use of popular song to enlarge and colour in the psychological landscape of his characters.
Bowker is well versed in the grammar of television drama: his varied CV includes the cool procedural of Undercover Heart, the heart-tugging Flesh and Blood and broad comedy in The Miller’s Tale from last year’s BBC retelling of The Canterbury Tales. The musical element to Blackpool was inspired less by Potter’s oeuvre than by an episode of Six Feet Under in which Nate imagines performing as a rock star at his own funeral. “What interested me was how he stayed in character. They are less inhibited about using those musical devices. Potter invented this radical piece of TV language and everybody seems afraid to use it because of the fear that we won’t use it as well. That isn’t a good enough reason not to try it.”
The key difference from Potter’s dramas was actually suggested by the show’s composer: the actors don’t mime along to the selection of pop standards from Elvis to the Communards; they sing along with all the natural logic of characters bursting into song in a stage musical. “That pulls you back into the drama; the pure miming pushes you away,” says Bowker. “With Potter it was nearly always a man trapped by disease or his feelings of lust or longing, so it was often perfectly appropriate that the music was this self-contained bubble. I’ve tried to make it more conversational.”
Not far into the shoot, it was decided that a lipsync coach was needed, even by the notoriously well prepared Morrissey. “She would sit in front of you as you sang,” he says, “and give you notes about the personality of the singer as well as the technical side. It was a massive exercise: you have the lyrics and listen endlessly to the songs. I took them section by section, listening to the phrases sung by the original artists.”
As for the songs themselves, Noël Coward once referred to “the extraordinary potency of cheap music”, which is why Bowker, in selecting a soundtrack to articulate characters’ inner feelings, leaned more heavily on the fluffier end of his record collection. “Our complex and deep emotions can still be reflected by a simple three-minute pop song, and not a very good one at that. Often I’d come up with a song and realise it was too literary. The Lloyd Coles you have to ditch because they are too good at painting a picture.”
In this sense Blackpool is nearer in spirit to the bare-faced cheese of Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! than Potter’s work. But if you’re looking for a more accurate template in terms of mood, theme and dramatic wit, Bowker’s script is closer to Alan Bleasdale’s G.B.H., another northern drama charting the downfall of a charismatic but corrupt public figure. Ripley has a shot at joining Robert Lindsay’s Michael Murray in the rogues ’ gallery of heightened TV villains. Certainly his two creators were powerless in the face of his demonic magnetism. “Dave Morrissey’s wife and mine both said: ‘Will you stop bringing Ripley home with you,’” Bowker recalls.
“He’s not shy, Ripley,” says Morrissey. “Whether it’s karaoke or making a speech, he’s on the front foot. He’s living a lie. He lives a nice lifestyle but everything is on the never never. He is somebody who has got by successfully in his own mind with the persona he has. And then that persona isn’t working for him any more. Everything crumbles in front of him. He’s a man who feels that the country needs him.”
It’s not entirely certain that the real Blackpool needs the likes of him. Given that many of the exterior shots were filmed during a month on location, the makers were obliged to earn the trust of the real-life arcade owners on whose expertise and goodwill they relied. “They were incredibly wary,” says Bowker, “with good reason. One said: ‘I expect you are coming up here to slag us off.’ Another said: ‘We are usually portrayed as worse than murderers.’ Our intention wasn’t to do a hatchet job. We were very straight — that it would be a story with warts and all. We won’t say: ‘It’s the most peaceful town in the country.’ But we won’t kick it to death.”
Blackpool, Thursday, BBC One, 9pm
