Ashley Pharoah
As Life on Mars creator Ashley Pharoah prepares to return to BBC1 with ‘eerie’ drama The Living and the Dead, he tells DQ about the six shows that have inspired his career in television. Ashley Pharoah (pictured above alongside The Living and the Dead producer Eliza Mellor (left) and script editor Katie Kelly) broke into television on the back of British series including EastEnders, Casualty and Silent Witness. Other credits include Where the Heart Is, Bonekickers, Eternal Law and Wild At Heart, but it’s for time-travel series Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes that the writer is best known. In Pharoah’s new BBC1 series The Living and the Dead, Nathan and Charlotte Appleby (played by Colin Morgan and Charlotte Spencer) inherit a farmhouse in 1894 Somerset. But their presence begins to unleash strange, unsettling and dangerous supernatural phenomena that will threaten their marriage. Produced by Pharoah and Life on Mars co-creator Matthew Graham’s Monastic Productions and BBC Wales Drama, the six-part drama will be available as a boxset on BBC iPlayer as of tomorrow, ahead of its terrestrial launch on June 28. It will also air on BBC America. Here, Pharoah tells DQ about the six television dramas that inspired him to become a writer and have shaped his own career. The Roads to Freedom (BBC) I watched The Roads to Freedom in 1976 when it was already a repeat (having originally aired in 1970). It was a BBC adaptation of John-Paul Sartre’s novels – there’s a pitch that wouldn’t get … Continue reading Ashley Pharoah
