'We are doing our own thing'
Inspector Lynley is back! But not as you know him, say the stars of the BBC remake, Leo Suter and Sofia Barclay
BBC
- Gareth McLean
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Leo Suter is at pains to point out that the BBC detective drama Lynley is not a remake of The Inspector Lynley Mysteries. “These are new Lynley stories and the show we’re making is based on other books that weren’t adapted previously. It’s updated and it’s fresh.”
This choice of source material isn’t the only difference between the new Lynley and the turn-of-the-century adaptation that starred Nathaniel Parker as peer-of-the-realm police detective Thomas Lynley, with Sharon Small co-starring as his scruffy, tough, working-class sidekick Barbara Havers.
Sofia Barclay and Leo Suter lead the series as DS Barbara Havers and DI Tommy Lynley. BBC/Playground TV/Jonathan Hession
“Our series is contemporary, and in the 20 years or so that’s passed since the previous show was made, UK society looks very different,” says Suter. “Class – this mismatch between upper-class Lynley and working-class Havers – is such a central feature of our show and class is always complicated and difficult to define. Even more so in a contemporary Britain and Norfolk [where Lynley is set] where the prisons are overcrowded and there’s drugs coming in from Europe onto the beaches. The social fabric of our Lynley is a very different one to Nat Parker’s 25 years ago and indeed to those original books that Elizabeth George wrote even before that.”
You’d be a fool to think class isn’t pertinent to people’s lives
Leo Suter
Suter, who is 32 and best known for his leading role in Netflix’s visceral and violent historical drama Vikings: Valhalla, as well as period dramas Victoria, Beecham House and Sanditon, was seven years old when The Inspector Lynley Mysteries was first broadcast and hadn’t seen the previous series or read the books. In preparation for the role, he admits that he “did dip his toe into the first book” but his toe is as far as he got. While he acknowledges that an awareness of Lynley’s previous iteration is useful, he explains, “I respect it and am grateful for it, but there comes a point when you have to say, ‘We’re doing our own thing’ and plough on with your own interpretation.”
As Suter says, class can be difficult to define. I ask him to have a stab at defining his because, on paper, he’s posh. He went to St Paul’s, an independent boys’ school in London, and then New College, Oxford. While he’s not aristocracy like Thomas Lynley – his parents were “business people” – he certainly would qualify as a peer to peers, as it were. To what extent does he think his privilege has factored in his life and career?
“You’d be a fool to think that class, even though it looks different today, is not a pertinent feature in people’s lives, so I’m very grateful for the education I was lucky enough to receive and I’m aware of the fact that it’s afforded me privileges growing up,” he says, after some consideration. “One of the things I loved about going to university was that I met a whole diverse range of people who I had not met previously at school, and I really value that. Horizons were broadened.”
What does he, as a son of business people, think of Lynley of the landed gentry? “He’s quite arrogant, he’s quite flash – there are so many things that you could not like about him. But I do like that he’s kind and that he’s turned his back on the life of being an aristocrat and just inheriting the pile. Instead, he’s doing what he loves and what he believes in, and he’s working really hard and in many respects, sacrificing his family life to be a good police detective. I think that’s very noble.”
On screen, Sofia Barclay has appeared in Ted Lasso, as sister of Brett Goldstein’s Roy Kent, and in the acclaimed Marvel movie Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, but perhaps her most significant role has been on stage. At the National Theatre, in 2017, she was in Lucy Kirkwood’s Mosquitoes alongside Olivia Colman and Olivia Williams, who played sisters. It was there, watching from the wings as Colman opened the play bouncing on a gym ball and engaging in quickfire dialogue with Williams, that Barclay learnt “one of the best things ever”.
“The scene is really fun and sets the show off to the races but if, for whatever reason, the audience were a bit flat, Olivia would literally just go, ‘All right, I’ll get them on the next one.’ She wouldn’t sit with it, she wouldn’t worry about it and she wouldn’t let that be her internal dialogue for the whole show. She cares about the work, but when it came to her ego, she didn’t care. She threw it away every night and trusted that she’d make up for it.”
And so, the then 29-year-old Barclay had an epiphany. “I thought, ‘I could spend the rest of my life really wearing perfectionism heavily around my neck – which I’d been doing up until then – or I can just do the best I can, show up and work really hard, then let it go. And I thought, ‘I want to be like that. I don’t want to be the way I’ve been’. And I changed.”
There’s a breezy, alluring confidence to Barclay that might well be the result of this epiphany. It might be born of landing a prime role in a potentially long-running, returning series. Or it might be a consequence of her privilege. Her character Havers might well be rough around the edges – and indeed all the way through – Barclay is not. Yet she seems surprised when I make enquiries into her background.
Nathaniel Parker as the original Lynley with Sharon Small as Havers. BBC
She is in fact a granddaughter of the reclusive billionaire businessman David Barclay who, along with his identical twin brother Frederick, once owned, among other things, Littlewoods, The Ritz hotel and The Telegraph newspaper group. Before their empire collapsed, the Barclay brothers were reputedly worth £7 billion. When did she realise she came from a privileged background and how does that figure in her work?
Barclay chooses her words judiciously. Trying to navigate a path through the perilous territory presenting itself – the Barclay Brothers were notoriously secretive, and notoriously litigious to maintain that secrecy – she’s a ballerina pirouetting through a minefield. “I’ll preface it by saying that anything that you read in the papers – particularly if it’s something that you know about – you always go, ‘Well, that’s not 100 per cent true.’ I would say there’s something that’s just, you know, very, very specific when those things happen,” she says, rather opaquely.
“But where class comes in with this show, there was just such an immediate thing about Barbara, right? She is a woman in a very male world. There’s a lot of prejudices against her. She’s living at home with her parents. She’s half Indian. She’s got a lot of baggage and she just has to do the best she can, to go as far as she can in her journey and in her work and put that first. And that is something that feels very aligned to me. And that probably, I think, answers your question.”
It doesn’t, but it’s the only answer I’m going to get. Clearly, obfuscation is hereditary.
Barclay is more direct – and more amused –when I ask her what she thinks the producers saw in her to cast her as Havers, described in Elizabeth George’s novels as “dowdy” and “overweight”.
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“A feral spirit,” she declares, impishly.
Authors
Gareth McLean
Gareth McLean has been writing about television for nearly 30 years. As a critic, he's reviewed thousands of programmes. As a feature writer, he's interviewed hundreds of people, from Liza Minnelli to Jimmy Savile. He has also written for TV.
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