EXCLUSIVE: “The cat and mouse dynamic is really good,” says Jason Watkins. “It’s a game where these two men are almost stalking each other,” adds Robson Green.
The pair are talking about the central dynamic in Catch You Later, the Channel 5 miniseries in which The Crown star Watkins plays a retired police officer, Huw Miller, who is plagued by the one case he failed to crack — stalker who taunted his town, toying with his victims before killing them. When Patrick Harbottle (Green) moves into a home on his street recently left empty when the occupier suddenly dies, Miller becomes convinced his new neighbor is the killer, thanks to three little words.
“The way Patrick says, ‘catch you later’ triggers something within Huw, who thinks he has his man,” says Green, star of shows such as Grantchester and Strike Back. “Patrick is over-friendly, and Huw feels everything is not quite what it seems. Very quickly you realize there is a game being played, but is Patrick a stalker and is Huw on the right track or spiralling out of control psychologically?”
So begins the cat-and-mouse caper, in which Miller and Harbottle, a seemingly genial man who befriends many of the locals, dance around what may or may not be true. For much of the four-part series, the audience is left in doubt about Harbottle’s innocence — or otherwise. Miller’s family suffers as he agonizes, with his daughter played by Sunetra Sarker (Desperate Measures).
Green continues, “The amazing thing that plays out in this series is the capitulation of Huw, played beautifully by Jason, and whether Patrick is just a friendly guy concerned about his welfare, or if he is psychological torturing him. The audience will wonder what his motives are.”
Interestingly, it’s not the first time Green and Watkins have played adversaries on screen. In a Season 3 episode of BBC drama Being Human, Green played a werewolf who faced off against Watkins, a vampire. Even further back, they appeared together on screen in a 1991 episode of ITV drama Soldier Soldier, though on that occasion they were army officers on the same side.
Watkins credits writer Tom Grieves, whose credits include Being Human, with the creative spark that he expects will intrigue viewers. “Good writing is about when you’re putting incendiary elements together,” he says. “In Huw’s case, that means retirement. “He’s had a good career as a copper, but there is unsolved business. There is a failure, as he sees it, trying to capture this rather cruel person. It has haunted him and we are catching him at that moment.”
Sphere Abacus will be showcasing the series at its London TV Screenings event on Tuesday, February 25. The show comes from Mike Benson‘s Clapperboard Studios, which has forged a unique path in British scripted TV by becoming the the producer du jour for Ben Frow’s low-cost, high-reward drama strategy at Channel 5. Clapperboard is behind numerous series shot on relatively shoestring budgets that have both rated well locally and sold internationally. Watkins — a BAFTA Best Actor winner for the two-part true crime drama The Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies — starred in Clapperboard’s Coma, about a family who confronts a group of youths.
“Channel 5 brought us the fantastic treatment Tom Grieves had made,” recalls Benson, Clapperboard’s well-liked founder and CEO. “They had fallen in love with the project and commissioned it from the treatment. That’s unusual in the industry, but not at Channel 5. They like to move fast.”
To make the finances work, Benson — who like many others has found budgeting drama at any tariff tougher and tougher over recent months — decided to shoot in Spain’s Basque Country. That meant “learning the ropes in terms of production infrastructure” and the challenge of locating crew and locations in a region filling up with competing projects, while casting Watkins and Green helped lock in money.
Benson says the process of unlocking the Bilbao Bizkaia tax incentive, which is up an eye-watering 70% for some projects, was “highly regulated,” but the biggest challenge was something much more practical. “Our big worry was, as we do lots of Channel 5 dramas, council estates tend to look the same wherever they are, aspirational homes the same, but British suburbia and its cul-de-sacs don’t.”
The UK’s drama tax credit for high-end TV series is a constant source of frustration for Benson, who argues it should help a wider range of projects, especially now distributors are less likely to invest in risky shows over “cozy crime” and broadcasters are reducing spend. “I’m a bit of a broken record on this: We should be able to make these four-parters in the UK, because we set shows in parts of the UK where they want production,” he says. “I’d like nothing more to film the shows where they’re set.
“At this budget level, it’s about appetite for risk. There is always a chance of overspending. We’ve been willing to take it because we have volume. Doing one of these series in isolation is risky – you might make net on the back-end, but that’s two or three years down the line. This Channel 5 relationship means we can protect margins across the slate, but even with that it’s tricky to make these budgets work.”
The U.S. retrenching from co-productions has further upset the equation. “Most of your MG is underpinned by a good American sale, and if you don’t have that you’re looking at the rest of the world,” he says. “It has been a real challenge to get the MGs we’ve needed.”
Unexpected roles
Benson enjoyed casting Green against type. He is known as one of the nicest actors in the UK and has hoards of fans from his genteel fishing programs and a spell as one of half of singing duo Robson & Jerome, with actor Jerome Flynn (Bronn in Game of Thrones to many). “And what I love about the Huw role is the element of The Long Shadow,” he adds, invoking George Kay’s ITV drama in which David Morrissey and Toby Jones play the desperate real-life cops who hunted serial killer Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. “What is the case of your career remains unsolved, and it become a story of obsession, whether that’s misguided or not,” says Benson.
Watkins praises Channel 5’s drama strategy, saying its originals “have a complexity that will rival some bigger streaming shows,” adding, “This certainly has that. You have the weird central relationship, but also a believable family who are funny, witty and silly who are put under pressure. They think he is going back to what he was, but he thinks it will bring him forwards. You’re seeing a real family going through an extreme time.”
The truth is eventually revealed — no spoilers here — but Green says Catch You Later is a series designed “to play with the audience’s emptions,” adding, “Tom has very cleverly created a world and a set of relationships where you just don’t know. And everyone loves a whodunnit.”
To create that took hard work. The shoot was long, intense and hot, but Watkins and Green both credit the crew, their fellow actors and, happily, each other, for creating a collegiate atmosphere on set. On weekends, Watkins sampled Spain’s famous late-night culture and both visited the Guggenheim museum as they soaked in the Basque Country. Green returned to his quiet Northumberland home with a “suitcase full of serrano ham,” but, “The highlight was reconnecting with Jason and reminding myself why I do what I do,” he adds.
Sounds like he might, well, catch you later.
