DCI Banks: Andrea Lowe

January 2014

WE didn’t see her in the last series as her character, DS Annie Cabbot, was on maternity leave with her first child. And the Arnold-born actress, Andrea Lowe, who plays her was doing the same.
“He’s now 20 months,” says the 39-year-old, who returns in the third series of ITV’s DCI Banks next week.
While Annie is a single mum, Andrea lives with her partner, Terry Betts, who works in fashion, in London.
“We just muddled through,” she says of the balance of motherhood and filming, which took place in Leeds from August to November.
“They were back and forth. Sometimes it wasn’t worth them being with me because the hours were crazy. Some of the time he was better off being at home in London with his dad.
“In the 11th hour, my partner was given time off work so that came as a godsend really.
“But every working parent has the same difficulty with childcare. And I still haven’t got my head around it.”
The new six-part series is based on three stories by internationally successful author Peter Robinson.
Annie returns to the team to work alongside Banks, played by Stephen Tompkinson, who filmed the BBC drama Truckers in Nottingham last year.
“He did mention that” says Andrea. “I was gutted I wasn’t part of it. I was really envious.”
The series, about a city-based haulage firm and screened late last year, was written by Billy Ivory.
“I’ve worked with Billy before, so if there was a character that was right for me, he would have got me in,” she says.
“And also, you’re not going to cast Stephen and me together in a another TV series after DCI Banks.”
She adds: “If there is another series, and I hope there is, hopefully I could be involved in that. I thought it was great.”
Caroline Catz also returns to DCI Banks playing DI Helen Morton, the disarmingly blunt and often socially inept detective who joined Banks’s team when Annie left to have her baby.
“Mine and Banks’s relationship is still at the forefront,” says Andrea, whose TV credits include Monroe, Accused, The Tudors, Shameless and Where The Heart Is.
“They don’t want to be attracted to each other but they can’t help themselves. There is both antagonism and affection there. Helen Morton adds to the mix and means Annie wants to prove herself but she’s not too worried because she is a feisty character.”
The first story, Wednesday’s Child, concerns a sinister child abduction, undertaken by a man and a woman claiming to be social workers.
As a new mum, was that a difficult story to open with?
“Not everything I’ve been involved with in my career has been gruesome and dark but characters I’ve played have witnessed a lot of tragedy,” says Andrea, who appeared alongside comedian John Bishop in Ken Loach’s harrowing film Route Irish.
“You become immune to it. And with Wednesday’s Child it’s a not a young child. Although there is a scene where we tell a mother that her child is dead and her reaction... that did get to me.”
Andrea’s first film role was alongside her friend Samantha Morton – the first really successful graduate of Television Workshop – in the musical comedy drama The Token King set in a high school in Nottingham. But Andrea wasn’t a product of the city-based acting school.
“I wasn’t although I was involved in a lot of Television Workshop projects so I feel like I was,” she says.

“And I’m friends with James Hooton (Emmerdale) and Chris Gascoyne (Coronation Street). I’ve worked with Chris a few times. We did A Thing Called Love for Billy Ivory, we played a husband and wife in Casualty and I was a love interest in Coronation Street.
“He’s a really nice guy,” she says. “Nothing like Peter Barlow. Although I quite like Peter Barlow.”
Andrea’s love of acting goes right back to her childhood in Arnold, where she grew up alongside two brothers.
At Redhill Comprehensive School she appeared in a production of Under Milk Wood and in her spare time attended Lesley Reason School of Dance in Gedling.
After studying English and theatre at Goldsmiths College in London, she cut her teeth doing small parts on telly, such as Peak Practice and The Bill.
Although she now lives in London, Andrea regularly comes home to Nottingham.
“My family are up there so I come back to see them with my son as much as I can. I was last there at Christmas.”

DCI Banks begins on ITV1 on Monday at 9pm.

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!’