What does new London-based drama Collateral say about the capital?

Billie Piper and Carey Mulligan shine in David Hare’s gripping TV drama Collateral — but it’s the capital that’s the show’s real star, says Susannah Butter
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It’s a thrilling way to start the week. High-octane drama Collateral starts tonight on BBC Two with an all-star cast and London in the foreground. Its director, SJ Clarkson, who made Marvel’s The Defenders, calls the capital “a character in its own right”. The show, David Hare’s first original TV drama, starts with tense action.

We’re in a busy takeaway, Regal Pizza, and a man is chosen to take a quattro formaggi to a south London mansion block, where a mother (Billie Piper) is pacing hungrily, holding her baby. As he leaves he is shot dead. This is all within the first 10 minutes. Later, we learn that he is probably a Syrian refugee — although the detective inspector investigating the case (Carey Mulligan) has a mammoth task of finding out who he actually is and how he came to London. Here’s everything you need to know about the gritty city shown in this four-part series.

Pizza-delivery drivers are the most loved people in London

For DI Kip Glaspie (Carey Mulligan) the mystery is this: why would someone want to kill a pizza-delivery driver? They keep London fuelled and can therefore do no wrong. Accordingly, Londoners are generous tippers — even when Karen Mars (Billie Piper) is peeved that her order’s wrong, she tips.

New role: Carey Mulligan as DI Kip Glaspie
BBC/The Forge

When Glaspie arrives at Regal Pizza to investigate she’s astonished to find customers who don’t care that a man has died. They are just agitated that they might not get their dinner.

But all is not as it seems in the pizza community. Regal Pizza’s formidable female manager acknowledges how competitive it is to be a driver. Regal Pizza has recently been bought by a man based in Boca Raton, Florida. Episode one ends with a hint at Regal Pizza’s darker side — we see the driver who was meant to be taking the delivery that got Abdullah shot exchanging envelopes with shady characters in a dark railway arch.

Au pairs run the city

Hare has said that the idea of the generic “strong female character” is two-dimensional, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of tough women in the show. Mars’s eastern European au pair is a tower of strength. We first see her pulling the duvet off her employer Karen Mars (Billie Piper) and giving her a firm talking to because she’s overslept and forgotten to take her daughter to school.

She hauls said daughter (played by John Simm’s real-life daughter, Molly) away from her breakfast and yells brisk commands at her to get dressed, all the while listening to music on her headphones. In a household where Mars chain-smokes, orders 9pm pizzas for her daughter’s dinner and has just lost her job, the au pair holds it together.

Your vicar may surprise you

Nicola Walker plays Jane Oliver, a lesbian vicar who wears Converse and isn’t above foul language. “I love swearing, I hate blasphemy,” she jokes.

She is going out with the woman who becomes the only witness to the murder, Linh Xuan Huy (Kae Alexander) but their story is complicated. They’ve lied to their MP David Mars (John Simm) about Huy’s status as a foreign student, and she feels so stifled by Oliver’s love that she goes out on secret ketamine and MDMA binges to decompress.

Walker says that Jane “pushes at the preconceptions” that come with being a vicar, and a female one at that. “She prays, but she is praying for her relationship not to be taken away from her, having finally found happiness in her personal life.”

The Labour party can make you sad…

…and boring. John Simm is brilliantly beleaguered as David Mars, the long-suffering member of the shadow cabinet who remains staunchly Labour even though it’s killing his love life, and his spirit.

His marriage to Karen only lasted three months. We see him dumped after three dates by a TV presenter because he’s called away from the post-coital bed to deal with the murder, which is in his constituency.

Simm describes Mars as “somewhat frustrated but hard-working”, adding: “Even though he despairs at the state of the Labour Party and many of its policies, he’s a loyal constituency MP.

He’s not afraid to be outspoken, and on more than one occasion he finds himself in hot water with the party leader because of that.” Sounds familiar.

Politician: John Simm as Labour MP David Mars
BBC/The Forge

Hell can be your colleagues

Much of the show’s tension comes from the working relationship between DI Glaspie and her detective sergeant, Nathan Bilk (Nathaniel Martello-White). He resents her seniority — she rose up faster than he did because she was on a university graduate programme. He criticises her for her flexible attitude to rules but she can take it.

Mulligan says she was inspired by a detective she met while researching the show. “She was influential in terms of the ladder you have to climb and what it means, day to day, to work in that job.” DI Glaspie is cool under pressure and wants to be treated the same as men.

Hare and Mulligan decided at the start of filming that Glaspie wouldn’t cry because it wasn’t in her nature. But that doesn’t mean she isn’t compassionate.

When Hare offered Mulligan the role she was six weeks pregnant. He said he didn’t see why her character couldn’t be pregnant, although it’s only referred to twice — showing that expecting a child doesn’t stop you being able to get on with the job (see Olivia Colman in The Night Manager).

Mulligan started filming with a fake bump and as her real one grew it replaced the prop. She was constantly hungry while filming, she has said, but it only affected her towards the end, when the baby would kick during night shoots.

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The Evening Standard will be first on the scene

When DI Glaspie arrives at Karen Mars’s flat she’s greeted by a cocky Evening Standard reporter, gloating that he arrived before the police and desperate to sensationalise what has happened by making it all about immigration. Remember, this is only a drama, we’re not really like that. At least Hare recognises the role that this paper plays in the city.

London is a complicated beast

The city we see has a dark underbelly, of drugs, immigrants who have fought to get here but are now living illegally, hand-to-mouth under railway arches. But it’s also a leafy place with beautiful terraced flats, where you can fall in love, where women rise to senior positions at work and people will surprise you with acts of kindness. Billie Piper sums it up: “It shows London in all of its ugly truths..”

But it is too nuanced to be anti-London. Piper continues: “There have been a lot of things recently that have made London feel more threatening but I believe in the city. I am not going anywhere… it contains so many different worlds, all coexisting.” The show was filmed during the London Bridge and Westminster attacks, which Mulligan says added to the tension.

“We had to make sure people knew that we were filming a drama and that they didn’t get panicked that there are suddenly 10 squad cars pulling up.”“But it was also amazing. When you are shooting in your home town, you don’t really think about where you are, and then you put it on camera and you just realise that you live in the most extraordinary city.”

Collateral starts on Monday, February 12 at 9pm on BBC Two.

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