Truckers (BBC1)

October 2013

A 44 tonne artic lorry thunders down Queen Street behind a Vauxhall Corsa, narrowly misses the Brian Clough statue and jackknifes across the Old Market Square before skidding to a halt behind the cherry pink saloon car, which has ploughed into the Left Lion.
Stephen Tompkinson climbs onto the cab roof, shouts obscenities and strips down to a turquoise thong.
It’s one of the scenes from Truckers, a new BBC comedy drama, set and filmed in Nottingham, which begins next week.
And it’ll show more of the city and surrounding areas than anything else we’ve seen on the small (or big) screen befoere.
“Nottingham is in the DNA of the series,” says writer Billy Ivory, who is also the executive producer on Truckers, which runs for five one-hour episodes from Thursday.
“I’m really proud of the Nottingham setting,” says the Southwell-raised writer, who was nominated for a Bafta for his screenplay for the film Made In Dagenham.

“Common As Muck was set in Nottingham but they shifted it to Manchester. And I had no power in those days to stop them.
“A Thing Called For Love was the first time I got them to come to the city, which was good but I kept saying I wanted Nottingham to be one of the characters.
“We got that with Truckers. Right from the opening shot you are looking right across the city. And the final shot of that first episode is Stephen and Ashleigh Walters walking down to the Old Market Square from the Theatre Royal. It’s a long, long shot and it’s almost like they’re being absorbed by the city.”
Truckers tells the story of a small family trucking firm and stars Stephen Tompkinson (Ballykissangel, Brassed Off), Ashley Walters (Top Boy) and John Dagleish (Lark Rise to Candleford).
“I’m ever so proud of it,” says Billy.
“And I think it’s very funny. It makes me laugh a lot. I think it’s got a very Nottingham sense of humour; that kind of gallows humour.”
It was filmed entirely in and around the city over a six week period during early summer. Locations included Hockley, Carlton, St Ann’s, Cossall, Wollaton Park and Eastwood, where the trucking firm is based.
To ensure the character of Nottingham came through, Billy insisted that each actor used a Nottingham accent.
“I was watching Saturday Night and Sunday Morning for about the 90th time recently, which I do every now and again when I need inspiration, and half of them can’t do it. They’re doing a stock northern accent.
“All of the cast on Truckers did a great job,” he says.

“Steve asked me to record some of his lines and send them to him but I told him that I’ve got a really weird accent. Where I grew up was kind of North Notts. Some of the lads I worked with on the bins would say ‘foo’  - ‘I’ll have a foo more o’ them.’ And it’s softened up since then because I’ve poshed up. But I did him a bit anyway and sent it off. When I saw the first day’s rushes I thought he was bang on the money.”
He and Tompkinson had wanted to work together for decades, since meeting while working on Minder in 1991.
“He did a regular stint on that and I wrote a bit for him then,” he says.
“We’d been tying to get something together workwise for a long old time but it just never happened until Truckers.”
He rates Tompkinson’s ability to be able to balance comedy and drama.
“My stuff should be funny one minute and then the next it makes you step back. I’ve been in situations before when you’re on set or at an audition and you say to an actor ‘it’s comedy but it’s very real’ and they play it like it’s a Ken Loach. I tell them ‘Yes, it’s real but it’s funny as well’ and then they start doing pantomime.
“But Steve can do it. George Cole was the same; his comic timing in Minder was just amazing. And Tim Healy can do that,” he says of the star of his Nineties comedy series Common As Muck, which had drawn on his own experiences working as a bin man in Notts.
Billy insisted that Tompkinson piled on the pounds for his role as Malachi, a driver going through a messy divorce.
“The bloke he’s playing has gone to seed a bit. He was a good looking lad who was into the New Romantics. In fact, he was in a band called Newly Romantic who were big in Newark - but nowhere else.
“So I told him to go off and eat plenty of pasta and not to worry about anything. Pile it on youth! But then he went and did Spamalot in the West End. He was on stage for two or three hours every night doing all these big dance numbers and, of course, he dropped all the weight.
“The wardrobe and make-up  have done a fantastic job of making him look like he’s carrying a lot more than he is.”

Despite the filming taking place on his doorstep, Billy was too busy to go on set. As well as working on his BBC4 feature length biopic Burton and Taylor, starring Helena Bonham Carter and Dominic West, he was tinkering with the final episode of Truckers.
“I ended up writing right up to the wire,” he says.
“The closest I got to a set visit was when I drove out to King’s Mill Hospital and I got as far as the pub car park next door. I was collared by the guy who runs Company Pictures (which produced Truckers for the BBC), we sat on a double decker bus, chatted for three hours, then I came home.
“It was a blow because being on set is the fun side of it. You get to see it coming together, because for years it’s been just words on a page.”
Neither did he get to socialise with Tompkinson, who has been a friend since before either had any success.
“He phoned up and said he had an afternoon off so he was going down to Trent Bridge for the Ashes,” says Billy.
“But I couldn’t go because I was too busy doing the re-write for the final episode. He said: ‘But you only live round the corner!’”
Reports from the cast and crew about their stay in Nottingham were positive.
“They loved it!,” beams Billy.
“The producer rang  me up one day and I thought ‘Oh God, is it more rewrites?’ but she said ‘I’m just ringing to say I’m just walking across the Market Square and I suddenly realise why you love this place.’”
As executive producer he watched all of the footage as it was shot at the end of each day and the finished series with his wife and two teenage daughters.
“It’s a brilliant stunt,” he says of the lorry/car scene in the Old Market Square.
“Most of the time with these big stunts on TV it’s about to happen but then they cut away, you hear a big crash and they cut to a load of smoke and a wheel spinning.
“But with this they had did this truck careering down Queen Street and nearly taking out Cloughie... I’m a County fan, what can I say?.... there are all these stuntmen diving out of the way and rubbish bins going everywhere, it wellies across the Market Square, jackknifes and then stops inches from the Council House.
He laughs: “The producer said it was a little bit closer than she would have liked.”

Truckers begins on BBC One on Thursday at 9pm.

Billy Ivory's BBC drama Truckers begins filming in Nottingham

May 2013

TRUCKERS is a comedy drama set in Nottingham about a small family firm with just six drivers. Stephen Tompkinson plays the lead character.
It’s five one-hour episodes that’ll be broadcast on BBC 1 at 9pm, hopefully in the autumn.
We’ll be filming through to July and we’re all over Nottingham; Cossall, Stoney Street, Stonebridge Farm in St Ann’s, Wollaton Park, Eastwood... it’s all over the place.
A lot of it will be on the inner ring road because that’s what you’re dealing with when you’re trucking.
And I’m hoping the finale will be on Slab Square as long as we get permission.
I wanted to film it at the edge of Sneinton near the Racecourse, where you are in the city but just a step away from all these fields. But we couldn’t find a yard down there that worked.
I’m an executive producer on it. It’s the sensible way to do it because you write the thing, you’ve created it and you know how it should be.
Steve’s fantastic in it. I wrote for him years ago when I did Minder, when I was first starting out. He has such an edge to him. We had the read-through last week and he was astonishing.
And he does a fantastic Nottingham accent. He rang me up and said ‘can you read my lines back to me?’ and I said ‘I can’t because my accent is all over the shop’. But I read a few of his lines and sent them back to him and he used that. He has a voice coach as well but he’s really great at it. And it’s not easy to do.
I remember Tim Healy in Common As Muck. He was going to try to do a Nottingham accent and in the end he just gave up.
Truckers is like all my stuff; it’s bittersweet. It’s funny but it’s got an edge to it.
I think it’s very different to Common As Muck and I didn’t want to repeat myself anyway. It’s similar in that it’s a work-based drama. It is a revisiting of that environment but it has very different concerns.

Common As Muck was about spiritual dirt versus actual dirt. This is about isolation. Today we are so well connected with each other through social networking but at the same time we are more isolated. You see that at gigs where everyone is together but they’ve all got their phones out.
I thought truckers were a brilliant metaphor for that. They belong to the same company but they go out on their own.
Each episode is like a little self-contained film about each of the characters and how they deal with the isolation.
Steve plays Malachi. There’s his son Glenn, a female trucker called Wendy, Michelle, who is the transport manager and Martin Banks, who owns the company Banks Transport.
Not one character is based on me. I suppose there are always bits of me in whatever I write.
But I’ve never driven a lorry.
I went out with a mate of mine, who is a trucker, when I was researching it. He delivers cement, concrete, grain and turf. And I got to know the joys of ‘trucker’s Tizer’, which is the bottles of amber liquid you often find in lay-bys.
I found it to be a very isolated job but they’d meet up at a particular truck stop or pub.
It’s been two years in the making for me and I still like spending time with the characters. I hope the audience feel the same, as they did about the characters in Common As Muck and Made In Dagenham.
We have a base in the city centre but I haven’t been there yet because I’m at home rewriting scenes for the final episode. It’s because one of the actors is getting married and can’t do certain scenes so I’m having to write him out of them.
It’s a bit of a nightmare but I’m getting there.
The cast and crew are loving Nottingham. The producer sent me a text the other day and said ‘I can see why you love Nottingham; it’s a beautiful city.’
And I said ‘I know and I look forward to seeing some of it when I’ve finished rewriting this bloody script!’

William Ivory

March 2011

HE may not have walked away with a BAFTA but William Ivory left with a head full of stories from last month’s ceremony, where his screenplay for Made In Dagenham had earned him a nomination.

“My wife can’t stand actors so I’d taken my daughter,” says the Southwell-born writer.

“She had her make-up done in the Savoy where all the actors go before the ceremony. She’s 16 and she loved it. Then we went to the do and she was spotting all these people that she recognised. Because she was getting excited, I was getting excited.

“We didn’t win which was a shame but I was ready for that and we went over to The Grosvenor for the party where Squeeze were playing. She didn’t know who they were but I loved it.

“We’d been given these wristbands for a Paramount party but we didn’t know where it was. Then we saw Gemma Arterton and asked her. We found it and there was Julianne Moore walking past. Then I was talking to this pretty young girl for a while about DH Lawrence and stuff. To be honest I thought she was one tin short of a four pack because I think she thought Lawrence was still alive and writing movies.

“Afterwards my daughter went ‘ that was Jessica Alba!’,” he laughs.

“I hadn’t got a clue.”

Next, father and daughter met Tilda Swinton, the Oscar-winning star of The Chronicles of Narnia, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Michael Clayton.

“My daughter, Tilly, is named after her and she was lovely to her. It was a great night. The only bit of the evening I didn’t like was when I saw Tilly smiling at this ginger haired youth across the room. I said to her ‘you can stop that’ and she said ‘it’s Rupert Grint, I think he likes me’.

“I said ‘well if he comes over here with his magic wand we’re going’”.

The success of Made In Dagenham, the story of female workers who downed tools at the Ford factory in Dagenham in their battle for equal pay, starring Jaime Winstone, Sally Hawkins and Bob Hoskins, raised Ivory’s profile and he’s since been offered a number of film projects.

“It was received really well which was really gratifying and there have been three or four things come in but most of them were dreadful,” he says.

“On the other hand I’m thinking it’s great that people want to work with me and it would be nice to be able to pay the mortgage for the next few months. But I know with the way I write that unless I actually have a real interest in it I’m knackered.”

He adds: “I do have my next film lined up which I cannot talk about at the moment.

“I’ve always wanted to say that,” he laughs.

It’s a feature film. He’s also two TV projects he hopes to finally get made.

“One of them, called The God Of Nottingham, I’ve been working on for nine years now.”

He’s also hoping to do stage a play at Nottingham Playhouse.

But that’s not why he’ll be at ScreenLit this weekend.

That’s for his new adaptation of DH Lawrence’s Women In Love. It will be screened at Broadway on Sunday, after which he’ll discuss the two-part drama, the first of which was screened on BBC4 last night. It stars Rosamund Pike, Rachael Stirling, Rory Kinnear and Joseph Mawle and is based on two novels by Lawrence, The Rainbow and Women In Love, which the Eastwood writer originally intended to publish as one. Ivory has melded the books together in line with Lawrence's original vision.

“I think Women In Love is the single greatest modern novel in the English language,” says Ivory, who was approached about the idea six years ago.

“I thought adapting the work of another writer was cheating. But I’ve always loved Lawrence as a writer. He wore his heart on his sleeve and therefore left himself exposed to the easiest (and most cruel) forms of criticism.

“That he is still so revered and so reviled in equal measure is indicative of the passionate, unapologetic approach he brought to his work. You might like him, you might not. He didn't really care.”

Ivory joined the cast for filming in South Africa last year.

“It had it’s moments. We had to shift baboons off a lawn before we could film. You don’t get many of them in Eastwood.

“And the some of the local crew would hire a boat at lunchtimes, throw a load of meat over the side to attract sharks, jump in to a cage and be lowered in to the middle of these sharks. That was their idea of a bit of fun. They were nuts. It was like working with Action Man.”

This year’s ScreenLit, which runs from Sunday to Wednesday, celebrates writing for British television. No-one locally knows that world better than Ivory.

After appearing as Eddie Ramsden in Coronation Street, he wrote Journey To Knock, the TV drama about his mother, starring John Hurt and David Thewlis. Then there were episodes of Minder and the award-winning Common as Muck, starring Edward Woodward, The Sins, starring Pete Postlethwaite, Faith; A Thing Called Love, starring Paul Nichols and Liz White, and war-based drama, Night Flight.

“I love doing feature films and plays but telly is where I feel happiest and where I get to extend myself the most,” he says.

And that’s despite its reputation in the industry:

“Dennis Potter said ‘if you say you’re a writer it’s fine, if you say you’re a television writer it’s like putting the word ‘processed’ in front of ‘cheese’”, he laughs.

And whenever possible he writes about Nottingham amd its people.

“And I’ll continue to do so until I get a blue plaque.”

William Ivory will be discussing Women In Love with director Miranda Bowen and Peter Preston, founder of the DH Lawrence Research Centre, at Broadway on Sunday after the screening at 1pm. For tickets call 0115 952 6611