What better way to celebrate International Women’s Day on a UK TV blog than to look at a piece of work by the UK’s most celebrated, famous and popular female TV writer, Lynda La Plante CBE? Even better, it gives us a chance to take a look at the show that gave the world its first proper chance to say “Hello to Jason Isaacs!”
Civvies was a 1992 BBC1 drama by former actress La Plante, who was fresh from BAFTA wins thanks to the previous year’s Prime Suspect on ITV. She’d written Civvies four years previously, but in common with a series she’d researched about the drugs squad, it had sat on the shelf until the Prime Suspect win had shown she was capable of more than just another rehash of her popular 1984 show Widows and its sequel Widows 2.
The show was inspired by a builder working on her house who asked her to help him find jobs for some friends who had just left the paratroop regiment. “I rang up eight different security firms, but they refused to offer work to ex-soldiers on the grounds that they were too institutionalised,” she said at the time in an interview with The Independent.
Deciding to tell the stories of these supposedly unemployable paras and men like them – in fictionalised form at least – La Plante created a show that saw a group of former paratroopers, traumatised and in one case seriously wounded by their tours in Northern Ireland, trying to find legitimate work for themselves on ‘civvy-street’ and instead inexorably being drawn into a life of crime.
For the show, which an executive at the time described as “the most violent home-produced series the BBC has ever made”, the producers assembled a cast including Peter O’Toole (Lawrence of Arabia himself), Peter Howitt (Bread and later the writer/director of Sliding Doors) and the relatively new-to-TV Lenny James (now best known from US shows Jericho, The Prisoner and Hung). James also went on to star in the BBC’s The State Within, where he was reunited with another Civvies co-star – a certain Jason Isaacs.
Here’s the opening title sequence.
Continue reading “Lost Gems: Lynda La Plante’s Civvies (1992)”