The Tower | Interview with Patrick Harbinson (Writer And Executive Producer)

What is the mystery at the heart of The Tower?

When Detective Sergeant Sarah Collins arrives at Portland Tower she finds, at the bottom of the tower, the dead bodies of a 52-year-old policeman Hadley Matthews and a teenage Muslim girl Farah Mehenni. On the roof of the tower, she finds a young police officer Lizzie Adama, and a five-year-old boy wearing a bear suit. That’s the mystery of The Tower: why were two police and two children on the roof? Why did two of them fall and two of them survive, and why does young Lizzie Adama suddenly disappear?

Is that what attracted you to Kate London’s novel, Post Mortem…?

An opening like that certainly grabs your attention, but there was a lot more to the book. When I pitched the project to Polly Hill at ITV I said the beauty of the novel is that it starts with a horrible tragedy – two bodies at the bottom of a tower block – but every incident that leads to that tragedy is small and completely believable. It begins with a neighbourhood dispute, then an intervention by the police that actually exacerbates the dispute, then a complaint about racist language that the older policeman Hadley Matthews might have used towards the Muslim girl Farah, which of course immediately adds a whole other dimension to the dispute, and shifts the spotlight, glaringly, onto Hadley’s younger colleague Lizzie: did she or did she not hear what he said. Small things – pebbles in a pond – but the ripples don’t die away they grow and grow and eventually overwhelm everyone. That’s why I loved the novel.

What do you think makes Kate London such a singular voice as a crime novelist?

First, she’s just a good writer. Her prose, like her story-telling, is taut and elegant, often very moving. Her characters are immediately alive and memorable, they’re engaging and persuasive even when you disagree with them. Second, she has an ear for dialogue and an eye for incident, the narrative lives vividly sometimes hilariously in the daily life of the police. And third, she has this rich repository of stories taken from the streets she was a police officer on herself.

What were you most conscious of getting right in adapting Kate’s novel for television?

I was the second or third writer to attempt an adaptation of the novel so I knew that it would be a challenge. Soon I found that if I stayed out of the way and let the viewer enjoy the relentless build-up of emotional and moral pressure on the characters (which is Kate’s hallmark) then the scripts just worked.

The second challenge was not exactly updating the novel but giving its story an extra resonance. When I first read Kate’s novels I knew immediately that there was one key thing I wanted to do. If I were lucky enough to win the option and get even one book made, I didn’t want to see two white actresses in the leading roles. For a TV series set in contemporary London In 2021, it felt, not wrong exactly, but too easy, almost tone-deaf. I discussed this in my first ever conversation with Kate and to my relief she agreed that one of the two leads – Sarah Collins and Lizzie Griffiths in the novel – could be black. So which one? Sarah occupies the moral centre of the story, but the younger woman Lizzie has the more varied and emotional journey. Given that the story of the first novel has as its instigating incident a policeman, Hadley Matthews, accused of using racist language, it was immediately more complicated and interesting to have Hadley’s colleague be a black officer. And since Hadley and Lizzie have a real friendship, the pressure on Lizzie to support Hadley becomes even more intense, and Lizzie’s journey as a character becomes even more – forgive the cliché – of a rollercoaster. So Lizzie Griffiths became Lizzie Adama. Getting this right was challenging: it involved many false starts, many conversations with serving and retired officers, black and white. But by the end, thanks to this ceaseless interrogation, we had characters that were more conflicted and real, and a story that felt richer and more relevant, that spoke clearly to the issues the Met is facing every day and particularly today. Will everyone agree with every decision our characters make? I doubt it, but at least they will understand their reasons. It’s another strength of Kate’s writing that she gives every character and point-of-view a fair hearing. She makes us question our assumptions and hesitate before judging. If the adaptation does that too I’ll be happy.

Was there anything you had to reluctantly discard from a novel that you loved?

Back story mainly. With only three hours of screen time and a complicated investigative story, I had no room to explore the personal lives of Sarah and Lizzie or any of the major characters. All I could do was hint at previous lives and relationships, griefs and joys. Thankfully in Gemma Whelan and Tahirah Sharif we have two actors who can take the smallest hint and turn it into something real.

Is this as much a story of community and workplace politics?

It’s a story of a typical London street – two families living cheek by jowl -one English white and middle-class, the other Libyan refugees, just settled in the community after two years’ of limbo in hostels and refugee camps. A dispute arises between them, basically out of nothing, and then escalates. And it’s also the story of a typical London police station, whose officers have to deal with that dispute. Kate’s novel is brilliant at observing both the community fracturing and the police coming under pressure because of something really small, what a policeman did or didn’t say in one of those houses.

Did you know you had your Sarah as soon as Gemma Whelan did her Zoom tape reading for the part?

We did. Gemma read for the part in her bedroom, sitting on the floor against her bed. In her read, she showed this fascinating ability to embody contradictions. She was fierce and gentle, strong and vulnerable. She captured the Sarah that Kate and I had written and added something really intriguing of her own. Every day I worked with Gemma I thanked our lucky stars that we’d cast her. She’s one of those actors who is both flawlessly prepared and completely willing to experiment. I could throw changes at her at the last minute and she’d absorb them instantly. After the main shoot was over we did some pick-ups in London. We hesitated over approaching Gemma because by then she was nine months pregnant, but in the end we summoned our courage and asked her if she could give us a day or two. Gemma, of course, said ’of course.’ She turned up on set with, as she said, ‘a basketball under her jumper’, telling jokes to the crew, cheerful and relaxed and beautifully prepared, gave us four brilliant new scenes and then, professional as ever, left in time to have her second child.

What does Tahirah Sharif bring to Lizzie?

We were deep into casting before I realised something rather obvious about the character of Lizzie: there are two of her. There’s the Lizzie ‘before the fall’, before the events at the tower – the young PC, working with her partner Hadley, loving the job, good at the job, dangerously attracted to her boss Kieran, basically loving life – and then there’s Lizzie ‘after the fall’, on the run, devastated by two deaths, consumed by fear and guilt and anger. We needed an actor who could capture those different women. Tahirah brought the lightness and humour – she has an amazing laugh (I actually wrote a scene so we could catch it on camera) and she has the intensity and emotion, plus a bracing anger that surprised us all.

How would you describe the relationship between Sarah and Lizzie?

When I pitched the series I compared them to The X Files’ Mulder and Scully: Mulder is the true believer, Scully is the sceptic. That dichotomy animates the entire series. Kate created, and I built on, a similar dichotomy between Sarah and Lizzie. Sarah is the straight arrow, the truth seeker; she will hold to the letter of the law, however hard that may be. Lizzie, however, is the pupil of Hadley Matthews. From her street-level perspective, the job has to get done, urgent problems have to be solved, sometimes the letter of the law has to be ignored, or even invented. That’s the heart of the relationship between them.

What do Jimmy Akingbola and Emmett J Scanlan bring to DC Steve Bradshaw and DI Kieran Shaw?

Steve Bradshaw is Sarah’s partner. He’s calm and politically adept: the opposite of Sarah. Jimmy and Gemma had an easy chemistry; you get their friendship, their effectiveness as a team. Steve is white in Kate’s novels but we did open casting for the part and Jimmy basically seized the role: he did everything the script called for and added his own relaxed power. Once we’d cast Jimmy, I found – as I revised the scripts in the run up to filming – that having a black actor play Steve made the character’s relationship with Lizzie more nuanced and more complex. It was one of those happy accidents of casting: Jimmy made the story and the whole series better.

Kieran Shaw is a risk-taker, a maverick; but he also has a distinguished record and is highly thought of by the police hierarchy – as Sarah finds when her attempts to investigate him are blocked. We needed someone charming and mercurial, with absolute self-confidence. Emmett has all that and more. He feels restless and dangerous on screen, and he captures the febrile, norm-flouting, line-crossing side of Kieran perfectly, both in himself and in his relationships with Lizzie and Sarah. As an actor Emmett is a risk-taker: he challenges every scene and in the process challenges himself. He can be mesmerising.

What was your favourite day of filming?

No question it was the interview scene in the final episode between Sarah and Lizzie, on which Sarah’s whole investigation depends. We planned to film the whole thing, more than 12 pages, in one day – when six pages is usually seen as a heavy day. Everyone was worried we wouldn’t make it, even our lovely director Jim Loach, on whom the responsibility rested. But I’d been in similar situations with similar page counts before, I’d seen how prepared Gemma and Tahirah always were, I knew we could do it… And we did. But it wasn’t being right that made it my favourite, it was the fact that this was the one day that Kate London and our police adviser Claire Job were both on set. So I watched these two real police officers watching our pretend police officers Gemma and Tahirah as they thrust and parried and fought, and I realised that both Kate and Claire were completely gripped. That’s when I thought, well, we might have something here… That was a good day.

What does Director Jim Loach bring to the telling of The Tower?

Anyone can see from BAFTA winning Save Me Too how good Jim was with actors. And I could see he has an emotional honesty to him: you never feel a false or forced note in performance or shot-making in his work. What I hadn’t realised was how good he was with tone, with the look and feel of a piece. He collaborated with our brilliant young Director of Photography Anna Patarakina to make a police series that doesn’t feel like a police series, instead they made three beautiful films. Thanks to Jim the series feels different, and that’s refreshing.