Getting ready for Ridley
As Ridley returns to ITV, creator Paul Matthew Thompson tells DQ about reuniting with Adrian Dunbar’s captivating detective, the challenge of writing compulsive murder mysteries and what it’s like swapping police drama for high-seas adventure aboard The Good Ship Murder.
As the creator of series including Ridley, The Good Ship Murder and Shakespeare & Hathaway, Paul Matthew Thompson has built a reputation for crafting the perfect murder mystery. And with further writing credits on Vera and Father Brown, it’s little wonder he’s frequently asked to write crime dramas.
“Hopefully, fingers crossed, I might get something away that’s not a detective drama. We’ll see. They always ask me to write cops,” he laughs. “I think it’s probably because my shows do OK. I say, ‘What else can you let me write?’ And they say, ‘We’d rather you write police shows.’”
While Vera, the long-running ITV series, concluded at the start of this year, filming has recently wrapped on the third season of 5’s The Good Ship Murder, about a former detective turned cruise ship cabaret singer investigating a string of suspicious deaths at sea, which will air in 2026 after a Christmas special.
A fifth season of the BBC’s Shakespeare & Hathaway: Private Investigators is also in the works, and Thompson has written on another upcoming 5 series, Missed Call. The five-part thriller from Pernel Media centres on a single mother who travels to an idyllic French village following the disappearance of her daughter during a school exchange.
Before then, however, Line of Duty’s Adrian Dunbar is back to star in the second season of Ridley, the ITV drama about a retired detective who returns to policing as a consultant. S2 debuts in the UK this Sunday.
Set in the north of England, the four-parter sees Ridley (Dunbar) resume his partnership with former protégée DI Carol Farman (Bronagh Waugh), who is now in charge of investigations. The cast includes returning actors Terence Maynard, George Bukhari, Georgie Glen, Bhavna Limbachia and Julie Graham, with John Michie joining the show.
Thompson co-created Ridley with Johnathan Fisher of producer West Road Pictures. He also writes season two with Julia Gilbert and Michael Bhim. All3Media International is the distributor.
Ridley was inspired by a real trend in British police forces for retired detectives to continue working as consultants. “I just thought that would be a brilliant concept for a copper,” Thompson says, “and I’m interested in exploring the psyche of a slightly older person. What’s really nice about Ridley – especially played by Adrian, who’s got a big following – is he’s a bit of a mature pin-up. It’s really nice to explore someone who’s not 25 as your lead. I like the fact that he’s quite a complex character, and he’s very hard to get under the skin of.”
When it came to S2, Thompson’s task was to expand on the themes of the first run, which explored Ridley’s enduring grief after the deaths of his wife and daughter and his decision to return to policing. Now the character is learning to live with what has happened in his personal life, and the show further explores his dynamics with Carol and a potential love interest with Graham’s Annie, who runs the jazz club he co-owns and where he frequently takes to the stage.
“It’s nice to have the jazz club, it’s that escapism,” Thompson says. “But I thought rather than it just being a bolt hole, how can I use the club to further his personal journey? So that’s a nice beat that runs through it.”
Writing a murder mystery is often dictated by budget, which determines how many guest characters might be able to appear. The stories are also led by an episode’s running time, with 90-minute stories naturally able to feature more character development than a slick 60-minute case-of-the-week.
“The lovely thing about Ridley is we do have a decent-sized budget, and we have really great actors who would like to be in it,” Thompson says. “For example, this series, I’ve tried to mix it up a bit and write things I’m interested in, in terms of crimes.”
The four episodes include a jewellery heist and a missing person case involving a woman suffering postpartum depression, which both see Ridley brought in to investigate before the discovery of a murder, “which ups the ante,” Thompson says. “Then the other two eps are more conventional in terms of we have a murder fairly early on, and we have to find out who did it. So it’s nice, variety wise, for those four eps. Each ep feels very distinctive and very different this series. That’s what you need. You need to keep mixing it up a bit.”
After introducing the show’s central figures in S1, this time the show has the chance to “really delve down” into the characters’ personal lives. However, Thompson has found it “surprisingly difficult” to find different ways Ridley – a man who lives alone and is happy in his own company – could relate to other people.
“The fact that this guy likes his isolation made it harder,” the writer says. “It always feels easier with Carol, because she’s married; she’s got a son, Jack. So I wanted to play on the Ridley-Jack dynamic. He was helping him with a boat in season one, so I thought, ‘What can we do with that? How can we move it forward?’”
He then imagined the worst thing that might happen to Carol. “So her son is arrested for minding a gun. Jack’s becoming embroiled in this crime. And I think for a mother, that would be a terrible thing, but also she’s completely compromised because she’s a copper,” he says. “How does Ridley help them out? Ridley discovers the gun ahead of Carol, so he’s got a dilemma about whether he should share this. He’s got a loyalty to Jack, but also his first instinct is he’s a copper. So of course, he’s gonna have to dob him in.”
As the actor playing the title character, Dunbar is hugely involved in developing the show and offering ideas about how Ridley might progress. “He’s not the kind of actor who’s just going to sit back and say, ‘What have you got for me today?,’” Thompson notes. And when it comes to the second season of a show, the actors often know more about their characters than the writers who first created them. “So it’s a nice collaboration where you get to a point when actors will say, ‘My character wouldn’t do that,’ or ‘Why are they doing that?’”
Dunbar was particularly instrumental in introducing the fact that Ridley is a jazz singer – meaning the show has something other than killings in common with The Good Ship Murder, which features star Shayne Ward singing in each episode.
“It wasn’t planned, it really wasn’t,” Thompson says. “When we conceived Ridley, we had no idea he would be a jazz singer. That’s something Adrian brought to the mix, and it was just the way it panned out, really, because The Good Ship Murder hadn’t been commissioned by then, so it’s purely coincidental.
“But what I’ve tried to do with S2 is it makes it less predictable. There’s not always a song at the end of every episode. I didn’t want people to think, ‘Oh, you’re gonna solve the case, then he’s gonna do a number.’ We tried to mix it up a bit.”
Like Ridley, The Good Ship Murder brings in a variety of writers to pick up episodes alongside Thompson, but the fact the show has large sections filmed on a real cruise ship takes the production challenge to another level.
Malta doubles for most of the exotic locations in the series – which is produced by Clapperboard in association with distributor Fifth Season – with filming completed on land before the cameras head to a ship and film the seabound scenes surrounded by thousands of people on holiday.
“It’s quite a task to pull off,” Thompson admits. But after several seasons of the show, the cruise ship company has become increasingly accommodating to the production, and guests are now even invited to appear as background artists if they wish.
“There are people who want to be on the telly who are very happy to be background artists and they’re genuinely excited that we’re filming on the ship,” he says. “There’s been the odd passenger who’s not been that keen to have their holiday ruined by a film crew, but that’s a really small majority. Most of them are really pleased that Shayne Ward’s on board.”
Making The Good Ship Murder is never a holiday for the crew, however. “I’ve been to Lisbon nine times and never got off [the ship], because when everybody gets off to go on their day trip to see the place, that’s when the ship’s a lot emptier, so it’s much easier to film. It sounds quite glamorous that you go to all these great locations, but most of the time everyone’s so busy filming that they don’t see them.”
Having written so many of detective dramas, Thompson surmises that the key to a successful crime story is working out a formula that features numerous red herrings and several suspects who could have committed the crime.
“Then you need to have it difficult and fiendishly clever, but not too difficult that people lose the plot,” he says. “There’s a fine balance, really. Sometimes when you work out the formula for a cop show, you can forget about character because you’ve got to have all these dead ends, but it’s always got to be character-driven or people are not going to be interested.”
In particular, he likes the idea of investigators delving into the life of the murder victim to solve the mystery behind their death. “In a way, the dead person is the most important person in it,” he adds. “It’s slightly different with something like Ridley and Vera, because you always have the body right at the very beginning, whereas in The Good Ship Murder or Shakespeare & Hathaway, you get to know them for a while before we kill them off. They normally get about 12 pages, if they’re lucky.”
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tagged in: Adrian Dunbar, All3Media International, Clapperboard, Fifth Season, ITV, Paul Matthew Thompson, Ridley, The Good Ship Murder, West Road Pictures