UK Primetime: Debbie Horsfield's new drama

[Sylph]

June 9, 2007

Back on the Cutting Edge

Debbie Horsfield, the writer of Cutting It, returns with a new drama. Our correspondent went on location

Seen from the bottom of the driveway at dusk, the house on the outskirts of Manchester where much of the BBC drama True, Dare, Kiss is being filmed looms spookily above you like the creepy towers of the Bates Motel in Psycho. Bare trees drum their knobbly branches menacingly on the windows. "It's as if the house has a personality and a life of its own," says the drama's producer, Marcus Wilson. "It seems to have its tendrils into everyone."

Hitchcock would have loved the house, as indeed does Debbie Horsfield, the writer of True, Dare, Kiss. What better place, she says, for a dramatist's first sortie into the mystery genre. "The house is exactly what I visualised."

Then again, Horsfield, whose successes so far have included Born to Run and Cutting It, describes herself as a hugely visual writer. "I need to picture the exact environment where I'm placing my characters. In Cutting It, I knew precisely what the hair salon would be like. In True, Dare, Kiss, it's the house.

"To be honest, I visualised a place a bit like the one that I grew up in myself in the 1970s in Eccles, where I've also set this drama. It was Victorian, shambolic and definitely haunted.

For example, we had a pile of flagstones in the cellar and we would often hear them being moved around by some unknown presence."

True, Dare, Kiss centres on Phil (played by Dervla Kirwan, of Ballykissangel fame), who returns to Manchester for her father's funeral and is reunited with her siblings – Nita (Pookie Quesnell), Beth (Lorraine Ashbourne), Alice (Esther Hall) and Dennis (Paul Hilton). After an absence of 20 years, she finds it unchanged from a fateful night in the 1970s when a cataclysmic event shattered the family's life.

"It's as though the house has been preserved in aspic," says Wilson, who also co-produced Life on Mars and has brought his expertise of all things 1970s to this set, too – the preponderance of Formica and swirling carpets here are just the tip of the iceberg. "We wanted to present the idea that whatever happened on that night caused the clock to stop." The exact nature of the secret, which stalks the very heart of this dysfunctional family, will be revealed, eventually, in the six-part drama. "But unlike Cutting It, where an audience could dip in and out, True, Dare, Kiss requires them to stick with the ride throughout," says Horsfield. "I hope they will want to."

True to the adage that you should write what you know, she set Cutting It in the world of hairdressers because her sisters were all in the profession. In True, Dare, Kiss she has written about a large family because she grew up with four sisters and a brother, so "understands the dynamic".

"Even if you go away, when you come together as a family you revert to roles and hierarchies you had as children," says Horsfield. "The eldest continues to think: 'You don't know how hard I had it, beating down the path for the rest of you.' The youngest continues to feel that she's forever the baby. The middle siblings always feel that they are invisible. Every actor who auditioned for True, Dare, Kiss said: 'Hey, this is just like my family!' There's a universality."

Though it's far darker than any of her previous dramas, humour and romantic entanglement feature once again. "There's a love story at the heart. After Dervla Kirwan's character left Manchester, her boyfriend (played by Paul McGann) married her sister, Nita. Phil's return reopens old resentments and rekindles old passions. It's the kind of theme I would have had in Cutting It."

The humour, when it comes, is of the black comedy, rather than belly-laugh variety. "There's a lot of dark humour, for example, in the relationship between the father (played by David Bradley) and Dennis, the son who never left," says Horsfield.

"They're like the odd couple and they torture each other every day. I sit and watch the rushes and I'm roaring with laughter, and yet it's utterly tragic. But then humour often comes from the most inappropriate situations. Even funerals can be funny."

There are more laughs on the terraces of Old Trafford, where a pivotal scene was also filmed during a live game. Horsfield, a lifelong Manchester United fan, turned up especially on the day to coach the bemused actresses on terrace jargon and football songs. "I think they all thought that I was pretty eccentric,' she laughs.

"Mind you," she adds, "I expect they were also pretty glad to get away from that house for the day." Who wouldn't be?

True, Dare, Kiss begins on Jun 21 on BBC One