Life imitating art

DQ heads to Cardiff to meet the cast and crew behind BBC comedy-drama Death Valley, in which a former TV detective utilises his investigative skills in the real world when he strikes a partnership with an actual detective.

At Insole Court, a Grade II-listed Gothic mansion house nestled in the Cardiff suburbs, murder is afoot.

A group of guests have gathered in the library of the grand building for a 1930s-themed murder-mystery party, each resplendent in period costume and hairstyling. But the small talk and chatter between them dies down when the sound of a large gong calls them to attention.

“Luncheon is served… with a side dish of murder,” cackles Patricia Hodge, here in character as party host Helena Hart. But when a real murder takes place, it falls on an unlikely crime duo to capture the killer.

The scene comes from episode five of forthcoming BBC comedy-drama Death Valley, which stars Timothy Spall as eccentric national treasure John Chapel, a retired actor who was best known for his role as fictional TV detective Caesar before retiring to Wales.

When his neighbour is murdered, John strikes up a partnership with disarming but ambitious detective sergeant Janie Mallowan (Gwyneth Keyworth) to help solve the case. The six-part series then sees the distinctly odd couple clash, bicker, brainstorm and bond on their way to solving a number of different killings, including one at the murder-mystery party. Other suspicious deaths lead John and Janie to infiltrate and investigate a walking group, a wedding, an amateur dramatics society and a school reunion.

The regular cast features Steffan Rhodri (The Way) as DCI Clarke, Janie’s boss and so-called mentor; Alexandria Riley (Baby Reindeer) as Baxter, a straight-talking pathologist and friend of Janie; Melanie Walters (Gavin & Stacey) as Yvonne, Janie’s ‘no boundaries’ mother; Remy Beasley (One Day) as Rhiannon, an old adversary from Janie’s past; and Rithvik Andugula (Extraordinary) as DC Evan Chaudhry, an eager-to-please and somewhat naïve junior police officer.

A BBC Studios Comedy Production for the BBC, in association with BritBox North America, Death Valley sees Spall in a role that couldn’t be more different from his part in The Sixth Commandment, the true crime drama that earned him a best actor Bafta earlier this year.

“That’s one of the joys of being asked to do various things, to go from one style of things to the other,” he tells DQ during a break from filming. “But I’ve always said that tragedy is a piece of piss in comparison to comedy. It just is. There’s no pressure, there’s no expectation apart from telling the story. With comedy, there’s more expectation because you’re committing yourself to saying, ‘I fully intend to make people laugh.’”

Pitched as a comedy-drama, Death Valley is a classic murder-mystery series at its core, but from the very beginning, the mismatch of John and Janie provides the humour, particularly as Janie “hero-worships” John’s TV alter-ego, Caesar, and she finds him to be contrary to what she was expecting. “Be careful when you meet your heroes,” Spall jokes. “But what I loved about this when I first read it is these two characters immediately recognise each other’s souls. They can be immediately rude to each other and honest. They both have an affection for each other and a kind of disdain.”

Despite the age gap, theirs isn’t a father-daughter relationship. Instead, it’s more like siblings, and purely platonic. “Janie is such an eccentric character with all sorts of idiosyncrasies and foibles,” Spall continues. “She appears to be quite ditzy on one level, but is incredibly intelligent on another and straightforward and quite blunt. She’s quite rude, but also perceptive and childish – the same as him.”

Beneath their respective bravado, both John and Janie must confront serious issues they are trying to deal with, and come to help each other deal with those problems. “It’s not sentimental, but it does carry a profundity because of this generational barrier-free zone,” Spall says. “This contact they have is rare across the generations, across the sexes. It’s interesting because it also looks very straightforward, but you’ve got all these layers and two people who come together to solve these crimes.”

When it comes to getting into character, Spall had quite the brief. John is a former actor who is best known for playing a TV detective, and is now playing detective for real by assisting an actual police officer solve a series of murders. Throughout the show, which is distributed by BBC Studios, there is also footage of Caesar, adding another layer to Spall’s performance.

“Without giving too much away, it’s lovely to subvert that [whodunnit trope] with the kind of eccentricity of these two characters,” says Spall. “In the first episode, when we see him going into his first foray into summing up the case, he’s constantly pestered by people who want selfies. We know where we are and what we’re doing, and we pay homage to it, but we always have the wonderful, organic relationship and the fact he’s an actor to subvert it. It’s a bit of a balancing act.”

Keyworth describes the show as “genuinely the best job I’ve ever had. It’s gorge, it really is,” she exclaims. “Working in Wales is always a treat, and the crew have been amazing.”

The actor, who hails from Aberystwyth, is best known for roles in Welsh-language series Bang and Craith (Hidden), as well as Alex Rider and Lost Boys & Fairies. Here, she jumped at the chance to play the “local bobby on the beat.”

“Without sounding too ‘tick boxy,’ she is neurodivergent, as am I. She’s somewhat easily distracted but still really good at her job, so it’s not a problem,” she says of her character. “It’s something we can draw humour from, and that’s something I deal with. The comedy always comes from the characters being themselves. That’s what really drew me to the scripts when I first read them.

“Janie is really determined, but the contradiction of being determined and easily distracted makes really good comedy. For the first time, I was really pleased that it wasn’t just a comedy that was laughing at the Welsh person. I wasn’t there to be the butt of the joke, it was laughing with these characters.”

When Janie befriends John, she discovers he has a skill for recognising character and emotion in people, and uses him to help crack the cases. But the partnership comes at a huge potential cost – that of her job. That leads classically trained actor John to find increasingly creative ways to become a part of the investigation, not least joining the am-dram society at the centre of one episode.

“She’s terrified of losing her job. When you play the truth of that, that’s really scary,” Keyworth says. “What’s amazing when you have an actor like Timothy is that he can bring something out of you that means you can really feel those stakes.”

In each episode, Spall and Keyworth are joined by a new round of guest stars who each become somewhat involved or implicated in the murder John and Janie investigate. They include Hodge (A Very English Scandal), Kiell Smith-Bynoe (Ghosts), Sian Gibson (Peter Kay’s Car Share) and Vicki Pepperdine (Poor Things). “We’re lucky to have some of the most fantastic Welsh actors, and lots of brilliant young actors. It’s a fantastic group,” says Spall. “And every time we do a new episode, we replace the company. It’s like Gwyneth and I are on tour.”

The creator and writer of Death Valley is Paul Doolan (Trollied, Bloods), who is a self-confessed murder-mystery fan. He has one dog named Marple, after Agatha Christie’s beloved detective, and another named after mystery writer Dorothy L Sayers. His agent also represents several actors who have played TV detectives – a fact that triggered the idea for a series that centres on the strange dynamics of a fan-TV detective relationship.

“It’s good having a TV detective and a fan, but what if the fan is also a detective and together they’re solving murders? It got quite meta,” he says. “I thought, ‘What if it just eats itself completely?’ So there’s an ex-detective who now helps a detective solve murders pretending to be a detective.”

The premise led Doolan to subvert the traditional murder-mystery format at every turn. “Whenever it starts to feel too much like a normal crime show, someone can come in and go, ‘Aren’t you John Chapel?’” he says.

However, he was cautious that the series not become a spoof of the genre it lovingly prods. “Because I’m such a fan of the crime genre, and I love writing comedy as well, I wanted to do one that was faithful to both. So whenever it started to feel like it was mocking the genre, I would steer away from that,” he says. “It’s hard to find that tonal line, but I definitely wanted to do a crime show murder-mystery fans can be fully engaged in, so you have a difficult puzzle, but not sacrifice the comedy either. Hopefully neither of those audiences will go home short-changed.”

Doolan worked with a writers room to help him map out each episode, and the crime puzzles at the centre of them. He was also keen for Wales to be more than just a filming location for the series, with Sian Harries writing additional material for the show and Nina Metivier co-writing episode three.

Having a distinct world for each episode certainly helped the writing process, as Doolan found it “really useful” to impose constraints on the murder-mystery plot, while restricting the number of potential suspects also helped to focus the story. “I definitely overcomplicated things at first,” he says. “Because I was such a fan of the genre, I tried to make it faithful to the whole thing. I feel like by the time we got to five and six, I felt quite comfortable plotting it.”

Momentum proved to be the key, as Doolan sought to give the series a sense of pace that would keep the story moving forward – and the audience engaged until the murderer is revealed. “It’s like when you read a murder mystery, what’s going to get you to the next page? What’s going to keep you interested? That’s where having a 45-minute timeslot, four suspects and serial arcs comes in handy,” he says. “There’s no time for navel-gazing. Their relationship also has that kind of screwball comedy pace where they can just insult each other and insult back. It will help make the show feel distinct from the genre.”

Another challenge was finding ways for John to interact with each investigation without raising the suspicions of Janie’s superiors. “You have these big denouement scenes and they’re always fun in the genre. It would have felt like cheating to not have John in those scenes, so it’s just testing that line of, ‘How do we get away with him being here?’” he says. “Sometimes that’s him going undercover and ingratiating himself. Sometimes it’s just him helping Janie because she needs it to progress her career. But I feel like we’ve answered it in every episode.”

When DQ visits the set, the production is entering the final two weeks of a 12-week shoot, with the six episodes largely shot in order to accommodate the different guest casts and locations. Unsurprisingly, those two elements were the biggest tasks facing producer Nikki Wilson.

“Casting has probably been the hardest thing because it’s set in Wales and the vast majority of the guest cast are Welsh. But looking at Welsh actors automatically does make it a smaller pool,” she says. “Then when you factor in that they’ve got to be funny, that makes the pool even smaller because we’ve got very good dramatic actors, but not all of them can do comedy. Then when you factor diversity into the mix, which is always a priority to make sure we’ve got different faces on screen and a variety of different acting talents, the Venn diagram becomes very small in terms of the talent that’s available.”

Spall and Keyworth were “no-brainers” to play John and Janie, however. The production did scout “every 30-something actress in Wales” for the latter, but from the first round of tapes it was clear Keyworth was the one. “Gwyneth’s audition actually informed what Paul was writing for Janie on the page. Thankfully, the commissioners loved her as well and it was all a happy ending,” says Wilson, who was further “thrilled” when Spall said yes to the project. The actor then worked with Doolan to develop John beyond the writer’s initial ideas.

Wilson has been “spoiled for choice” in terms of locations, as Wales itself has become an integral part of the show. Filming took place at places including Penarth Pier, the Blaen-y-Glyn waterfall and the Brecon Beacons, the “chocolate box” town of Llantwit Major and The Paget Rooms in Penarth, as well as Insole Court. “There are a lot of scenes that take place in the police station and John’s house, so when we’re outside [it’s important] we are delivering on the scale and the beauty as well,” Wilson notes.

But complicating the production further has been the little matter of filming scenes from Caesar, the fictional 1990s TV drama that made John a household name. Moments from the show-within-the-show, which is set in the 1950s, are woven throughout Death Valley, usually when someone happens to be watching it or when it appears on a TV in the back of a scene.

“He’s where I get to get all the classic crime tropes out,” Doolan says. “He’s very interwar period, very meticulous, not a million miles from Poirot and the idiosyncrasies of [Sayers detective] Peter Wimsey.

“There’s definitely an iconic coat because Janie gets to wear it in episode two when John’s clearing out his house. She’s fully obsessive about the props of Caesar and he’s pretending he doesn’t care. I quite liked the idea of those actors who have the albatross of one part they’ve played really well for years, where they sort of resent it but also take pride in it. I liked the line between that.”

It’s that uniqueness of tone that means Death Valley is a standout series for Nick Lee, commercial director for drama and comedy at distributor BBC Studios. “It will appeal to mystery fans and it will appeal to the cosy-crime audience. But it’s got a wit to it and a sharpness to it,” he says, “and the chemistry between the two leads is what makes it stand out. You never want to get ahead of yourself, but the recipe for this show and what Timothy Spall brings to it means you can imagine it running for quite a long time. Fingers crossed when it lands on the BBC.”

With a cliffhanger ending to the serialised story arc involving John and Janie, Doolan already has plans for more adventures with the detective duo and unlimited different worlds they could find themselves in, while he is also entertaining the idea of an all-Caesar Christmas special. “I don’t know how you’d do it. The page-one version of it is a dream, but I’d definitely want to do that,” he says. “It’s just figuring out how to sustain that for an episode, but I’d love to give that a go. It’s definitely one we’re thinking of.”

As for Spall and Keyworth, they’re starring in a show about a TV detective who plays the role for real. So would either of them make good detectives themselves? “I have a habit of losing things,” jokes Keyworth. “Janie is better at keeping things together than I am, so I fear I would lose all the key evidence. So probably not.”

“Useless. I’d be a pushover,” adds Spall. “You have to have a forensic mind, and I don’t have that. I might be able to work something out from a psychological point of view. But I’m no good at chess, and you have to be a chess player and understand process. You have to go through eradication. What I do know about police work is that although what we see in the presentation of it is exciting and brilliant, a lot of it is just hard graft. Sifting through loads and loads of evidence, paperwork, getting to the evidence, building a case that is mundane on the face of it. That’s proper hard cop work.”

tagged in: BBC, BBC Studios, Death Valley, Gwyneth Keyworth, Timothy Spall