Another interview for Better
A witty, no-nonsense policewoman faces off against a charismatic but chilling villain in crime-filled Yorkshire. You can see why Better might fill a Happy Valley-sized hole when it starts tonight on BBC1.
That, probably, is where the similarities end because Lou and Col, the central pair in the new series, have a very different relationship from Catherine Cawood and Tommy Lee Royce in Happy Valley. For a start they actually like each other. Lou (Leila Farzad, aka Suzie’s manager in I Hate Suzie) is a high-ranking cop in Leeds, while Col, played by Andrew Buchan — who was the grieving father Mark Latimer in Broadchurch and Matt Hancock in This England — is the dapper Northern Irish head of a drug-dealing network.
Not a typical friendship, then, but they’ve been scratching each other’s backs for 19 years, rising to the top in their respective fields. The five-parter by Jonathan Brackley and Sam Vincent (Humans, Spooks) is moody and stylish with flashes of gallows humour. In the first episode Col invites Lou to his birthday dinner, telling the guests: “I’ve made it to another birthday in a challenging line of work.” Col and Lou sneak off for a fag. “I would not be here today without you,” he tells her. “Same here,” she replies. Their loyalty to each other is about to be challenged.Better is “a character-driven morality piece about redemption”, Buchan says over Zoom from a café near his home in Buckinghamshire. “And two characters who’ve made some very particular choices that slowly start unravelling. They’re both landlocked in a sense but just can’t get out.”It is, he adds, “nothing like Happy Valley”, although he understands why people might wonder.
The night before we speak he was at a screening in Leeds, where the show is set and shot. “One of the questions from the audience was about how people are going to naturally draw comparisons with Happy Valley. But in the future, hopefully, when a million more shows are being made up there, you wouldn’t need to draw comparisons.”Shows such as the one Buchan, 43, has just written, Passenger, which we’ll get to later. He is a proud northerner, having grown up in Bolton and married a fellow Lancastrian, Amy Nuttall, who played Chloe Atkinson in Coronation Street and Ethel the maid in Downton Abbey, with whom he has a child.
He used to excel at what he calls “everymen going through a crisis”, from Mark in Broadchurch, whose son is killed, to a former soldier accused of murder in The Fixer. These days he brings similar nuance to less ordinary — and richer — types: the millionaire scion John Paul Getty Jr in All the Money in the World; Andrew Parker Bowles, husband of Camilla, in The Crown; Felim Bichan, a financial player in Industry. SKY UKHis character in Better is loaded and powerful with an Ulster accent to boot, while the London-born Farzad, whom he describes as “a force”, does a Yorkshire one. Both sound pretty impressive to these poncey southern ears. Col’s accent was inspired by the Belfast-raised actor Jamie Dornan. “I bumped into him in a lift in London and we had this little brief chat,” Buchan says. “It’s such an amazing accent. I was walking along, quietly doing impersonations of Jamie Dornan to myself.
”When Buchan was first offered the role, “I was, like, ‘God no. He’s got to be 68 with a loose tooth and a gold chain. I’m not that guy.’ ” The director told him that they wanted someone a bit more charming. “He’s quite calm and careful and considered. He’s not a psychopath. But when people press his buttons he can go places.” Col’s lavish modernist house, filmed in Harrogate, “was a wee bit ridiculous”, Buchan says. Harrogate’s posh, isn’t it? “To us Boltonians it definitely is.”
He got closer to privilege when reading modern languages at Durham University and studying at Rada, where he was in the same year as Tom Hiddleston and Andrea Riseborough.Buchan also starred in the political drama Party Animals with Riseborough, whose recent Oscar nomination has been criticised after she benefited from celebrity cheerleaders including Gwyneth Paltrow and Kate Winslet. “All I know is that she’s a phenomenal actress,” Buchan says. “My initial reaction to her being nominated was ‘about time’.
”Playing Hancock was “interesting”, he says, but he won’t be drawn on a political judgment. This England went quite easy on the former health secretary but Buchan “could only play what was on the page”, although he admits he must have “subliminally” incorporated his impressions of a man he had seen on TV daily during the pandemic.Well, it worked — his performance was eerily persuasive. He won’t say what he thinks of Hancock doing I’m a Celebrity but he raves about Kenneth Branagh’s take on Boris Johnson. “I’ve worked with some witty folk in my time, but Ken’s ad libs are off the scale.”
We talk about The Crown, in which he starred with Josh O’Connor and Emerald Fennell (“whose careers have nosedived obviously since then”, he says wryly), and All the Money in the World, where Christopher Plummer famously replaced Kevin Spacey as John Paul Getty Sr after Spacey was accused of sexual misconduct.Filmed in Rome, it was a taste of movie opulence that Buchan hadn’t had before. He compares it with The Fixer in 2008: “We filmed it in Lewisham, in minus 2C, covered in fake blood, in a vest and it was all quite unpleasant. So, to shoot in Rome!” For the reshoots he was flown back out on a private jet with Plummer, Michelle Williams and Ridley Scott, the director. “I think I was the only one who’d never been on a private jet before.”
Plummer handled the cast and crew with panache, he says, which was hard “when you’ve got 20,000 people in between takes saying, ‘Can you do Edelweiss?’ ” Plummer and Spacey had “very different takes” on the role, the father of Buchan’s character. “Christopher grabbed my hand really tightly and smiled at me with this twinkle in his eye, which was really unnerving. Whereas Kevin was the complete opposite.” More in character? “Yeah, whereas Christopher kind of played against it.”
His big ambition is to do more comedy. When he was playing the 18th-century lawyer William Garrow in Garrow’s Law he had long chats about it with his co-star, Alun Armstrong. “Al said, ‘The problem is that good comedies are as rare as rocking horse shit.’
”Buchan has found a neat way around that problem — writing his own show for ITV. Passenger is a horror comedy set in a small village called Chadder Vale in Lancashire. “We start filming in five days’ time, which is quite frightening,” he says. He won’t be acting in it but he has written all six episodes.“I’m on a bit of a hamster wheel at the minute, churning them out. When you can hear the execs barking at you, ‘We need, we need, we need . . . ’ you think, ‘I’m just going to treat that as white noise.’ ” The series will feature a former Met policewoman called Riya Ajunwa investigating a series of unnatural crimes including the abduction of a local girl. Dark, funny, female cop, set in the north — it’s all the rage, you know.
