On the Bradford beat
Virdee star Staz Nair and creator AA Dhand tell DQ about partnering for this pulsating BBC crime thriller, showcasing the writer’s home city of Bradford on screen and convincing Hans Zimmer to compose the theme tune.
In the year that Bradford celebrates its designation as UK City of Culture, it’s fitting that the BBC will launch a new drama set in the West Yorkshire hub.
Yet the arrival of TV’s latest detective, who lends his name to the title of the pubcaster’s crime thriller Virdee, marks the culmination of almost two decades work for author and screenwriter AA Dhand.
Raised in Bradford as the son of convenience store owners who also ran a video rental library, he spent years watching films “all day, all night – and most of them were way outside the age range that I should have been watching,” he tells DQ. Then when he watched 1991 classic The Silence of the Lambs, he came to understand how novels could be adapted for the screen.
“The minute I realised that stuff you could watch on TV could be adapted from a novel, I just got the idea in my head as a youngster that, well, maybe I could do this,” he says.
Subsequently, he began writing stories about Detective Harry Virdee in 2006 as a response to the fact “this character didn’t exist anywhere in the Western world,” he explains. “South Asians, for so long, had almost been pigeonholed in comedy roles. Really amazing stuff – Goodness Gracious Me was groundbreaking, stand-up comedians had gone global and were absolutely killing it – but there’s this huge gap for drama. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a South Asian show in the Western world that was elevated, intense and heightened.
“I thought, ‘Well, someone’s going to do it one day, so I’ll just start writing.’ I really got obsessed with it.”
It took 10 years to get the first Virdee novel published – there are now five in the series – and the intervening years have seen numerous attempts to bring the character to the screen. The detective will finally make his television debut this Monday after the BBC commissioned a six-part adaptation produced by Magical Society, written by Dhand himself and set and filmed entirely in Bradford. It is distributed outside the UK by Cineflix Rights.
Opening with a thrilling and visually dynamic sequence that takes viewers from the city’s rooftops to a market floor and a train station, it introduces the title character, a dedicated cop estranged from his Sikh family after marrying Saima, a Muslim woman.
As a turf war brews in the underbelly of the city, the murder of a young dealer leads Harry’s duty to uphold the law to clash with his links to members of the criminal gangs. But while the killer holds the entire city to ransom, Harry realises he is going to need the help of his brother-in-law Riaz, a drug kingpin who runs the largest cartel in the county. Pulled together in an alliance that could ruin them both, Harry must make a choice: save himself and his family or save his city.
Staz Nair (Rebel Moon) heads the cast as Harry, with Aysha Kala (Criminal Record) as Saima and Vikash Bhai (Crossfire) as Riaz. Kulvinder Ghir (Foundation) and Sudha Bhuchar (Expats) play Harry’s parents, Ranjit and Jyoti, while Elizabeth Berrington (Good Omens) is Harry’s boss DS Clare Conway and Danyal Ismail (All the Lights Still Burning) is his new partner, DS Amin.
Nair agrees that in most corners of the entertainment industry, there aren’t many “heroic, complex South Asian protagonists.” So the chance to take on a character who represents that community was “super exciting,” he says. “How we level the playing field is by honouring our culture, but then making it a story about the human dynamics that everyone understands: love, loss, family and the secrets we keep. This is how I believe we truly go beyond the cliché of representation.”
The actor read the first Virdee novel, Streets of Darkness, and spoke to Dhand to get a feel for the character, who he believes stands apart from other TV detectives through his intellect and emotional intelligence.
“This man is very cerebral. He feels everything,” Nair says. “I wouldn’t go as far as saying [he has] synaesthesia, but he feels everything. He feels the pain of what’s going on in the city. He’s not a detective that is impervious to the natural throes of emotions of being a human being. He leads with empathy and vulnerability, which as much as it can be is a superpower. In many ways it’s also a curse, because you can’t juggle all of these things.”
Comparing the character to Breaking Bad protagonist Walter White’s alter-ego Heisenberg, Nair was also inspired by a line written by Dhand in his first book that best describes Harry’s moral compass: the line between right and wrong is as thin as a sheet of ice.
“This is a man who lives by his own moral code,” he continues, “and he will do whatever is necessary to get the job done. If it means skirting the line of the law, protecting the city, protecting his family, he’ll do whatever is necessary – and it’s an interesting way to make a protagonist, because you almost verge on anti-hero.”
That his professional and personal lives are intrinsically intertwined means his job is not just his occupation – it’s also his identity.
“Part of me believes that Harry Virdee is under the impression that if he can save the city, maybe he can save his own soul and find redemption for things,” Nair adds. “That’s a very tough thing to constantly wage war with internally. You’ll notice he doesn’t smile a lot. Taking all that on, it’s a big load. But tons of fun. I couldn’t have done it without Amit [Dhand].”
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Dhand describes himself as a visual storyteller, writing his novels around a number of key set pieces – “big, exciting incidents that give you a dopamine hit and keep you reading,” he explains. In fact, three words he always keeps in mind when writing are pace, passion and power, and he was sure to approach the scripts for the series in exactly the same way.
“The pace comes from the fact that Harry has got so much going on in his personal life, in his professional life, that he’s trying to balance it all,” he says. “Passion comes from the love story between him and his wife, and there’s a family dynamic between him and his mum and dad. Power is that struggle for Bradford, between him and his brother-in-law.”
The BBC drama is largely based on the third novel in the Virdee series, 2019’s City of Sinners, and one slight change between the book and the show is the fact that Riaz is his brother-in-law on screen, rather than his brother.
It’s an example of how, when it came to writing the adaptation, Dhand was keen not to simply regurgitate the events and character dynamics from his books. “So I have to start writing new stuff and think about the character in a new way,” he says. He also imagined putting two friends on opposing sides of the law. But there’s enough ambiguity for viewers to question whether Harry really is a force for good.
“When it comes to adaptation, it was about making that relationship more complicated, because with complication comes drama,” he notes. He also enjoys creating triangles between characters, with Harry and Riaz caught either side of Saima. “Then everything that one does will affect the other. So it was a really liberating experience to adapt it, because I felt really free to deliver the script I always wanted to see on TV.”
“What was really wonderful about the script is that it went beyond just being what’s Harry Virdee’s life and what’s going on around him,” Nair says. “Amit really delved deeper into the personal dynamics of Saima, Riaz and the worlds around the parents. That’s a brilliant way to serve the story and broaden the relatable quality from a spectator standpoint. It was a really wonderful thing to witness and then be a part of and play alongside.”
The script – and the series – also put Bradford and Dhand’s love of his home city front and centre, and Nair says he could feel the pride for Bradford after spending time with Dhand and his friends. It meant it was important to him that the series sought to “capture, understand and find identity in that” through his portrayal of Harry.
Bradford, Dhand says, is “unbelievably cinematic,” with gothic bohemian architecture found across what was once an major economic power thanks to its textile industry. “It’s an incredible city and there’s so many locations.”
Dhand sought to juxtapose elements of ‘New Bradford’ with the old city, as well as mirroring what’s happening in the character’s personal lives with the locations of some scenes. “So if Harry is going to do something physical, I’ll put you in the nightmarish ruins of a mill that’s been lying abandoned, because it just elevates the drama and the intensity,” he says.
“If I’m with Harry and Saima, I want to be in City Park with all the water fountains and the colour scheme. and it’s beautiful, it’s picturesque. What Bradford gives you, I believe really uniquely, is the fact that whatever’s happening on screen emotionally, I can find you a location within the city. I can really mirror what’s happening visually with what’s happening internally.
“When I was writing the books and the screenplays, it was about where can I go to really showcase the city. What comes through really clearly in episode one is I’m really trying to show off Bradford here. I’m trying to showcase it in a way that I don’t think anybody’s ever seen before.”
As well as the Virdee cast, Dhand’s other key collaborators on the series include directors Mark Tonderai (Gotham, Doctor Who), Milad Alami (When the Dust Settles) and Mo Ali (Hijack); executive producers Paul Trijbits (Jane Eyre) and Jo McClellan; and producers Stella Nwimo (Gangs of London) and Himesh Kar (Murder Manuel).
Then there’s world famous, multi-award-winning composer Hans Zimmer (Interstellar, Gladiator, Inception), who scored the title theme with James Everingham for Bleeding Fingers Music, the screen music label co-founded by Zimmer.
Describing himself as Zimmer’s number-one fan, Dhand has written all his Virdee novels to Zimmer’s music. Then when he was watching a BBC documentary about Zimmer, he heard the composer remark that when he writes music, he always writes for “a lady from Bradford called Dorothy who’s got a great coat.” Inspired by this, Dhand drafted a letter inviting him to join the series.
“My success in life has been writing letters, whether it’s getting [US talent agency] William Morris Endeavour to represent me or whether it was trying to get the BBC to do the show. I’ve always written letters,” he says. “So I wrote him a letter. ‘I’m a big fan, yada, yada, yada. I’m from Bradford, I’m not called Dorothy but I do have a great coat – and I’ve never heard Hans Zimmer with a double-sided Indian drum. I’ve never head Hans Zimmer with a Bollywood twist. Do you fancy it?’”
A week later, the soundtrack arrived.
“Without Hans Zimmer, I don’t think there would be Harry Virdee, because he has an amazing ability to do light and dark. He really devastates you with emotion, and then he raises you,” Dhand says. “How he does his music really is a god-given talent. I just sent a letter out to him, to be honest, and the rest is history.”
Nair similarly enjoyed a close collaboration with his fellow actors and the crew, not least the father-and-son stunt team of Nrinder and Osho Dhudwar, who put him through his paces to create several standout action sequences.
In particular, the opening scene plays like an extended one-shot as Harry chases down a suspect, Novak (Lewis Goody), while the camera flies across Bradford’s evening skyline. It’s actually a composite sequence of multiple shots stitched together, each of which demanded that Nair sprint up to 400 metres at a time.
“For about an hour-and-a-half, I’m doing this over and over again. That’s the nature of the business, and I’m loving it. Then I finish and, as our director, Mark, and my wife are walking around the corner checking on me, I’m throwing up into a bin while Novak, the guy I was chasing, is rubbing my back in support,” Nair recalls. “There was the irony of it being the guy you’re chasing going, ‘You’ve got this. It’s alright.’
“But I also love that. It’s wonderful to push yourself. There’s something masochistic in me that really enjoys pushing myself emotionally and physically, and there’s a great reward and catharsis as well in getting that.”
Playing the emotional side of the character was more of a challenge. “But if it wasn’t a challenge, I don’t think I would have been accessing the necessary things to pull it off. Everyone on set was super understanding, and even with Amit, with a couple of emotional scenes, there was a dialogue about how we really make this hit. How do we say it without saying it? How do we how do really push the emotion without it feeling melodramatic?”
He adds: “It was a collaborative effort. And I hope [audiences] enjoy it. I will never be sure what I think of myself as an actor. But I hope [they] enjoy it.”
tagged in: AA Dhand, BBC, Cineflix Rights, Hans Zimmer, Magical Society, Staz Nair, Virdee