2 weeks ago
4
Crime doesn’t come any cosier than this. Death Valley, hitherto a name attached only to a desert canyon in California, is now also a leafy corner of Wales, the chosen hideaway for a retired actor played by Timothy Spall. The villages are small, stony and picturesque; the inhabitants are blessed with the prettiest accent in English and the gossip over garden fences is enlivened by a startlingly high incidence of murder.
A tiresome hiking guide falls by the wayside; an amateur dramatic society gets bloody behind the scenes; a murder mystery weekend at a country house takes a realist turn. None of these violent deaths are remotely distressing, as is the way in these kinds of stories. On the contrary, it is all jolly banter between the detectives – in this case, the pompous John Chapel (Spall) and a young police officer, Janie Mallowan (Gwyneth Keyworth), with whom he forms an unlikely, chafing friendship – and a running gag about tea and biscuits.
“I’m a murder mystery fanatic and I love comedy,” says Paul Doolan, an established comedy writer who devised the new series. “It’s a thing of writing the show you wish was on TV but isn’t. Modern crime shows are relentlessly grim. I know murder isn’t the funniest thing in the world, but you have these detectives whose home lives are horrible, where the people are dour and everything is grey. Here, I hope at the end titles you’re feeling a little better than you did at the start.”
Timothy Spall says the series appealed to him because – though he did play a victim in 2023’s dark true-crime drama The Sixth Commandment – cosy crime was a genre he had never tackled.
Spall says he’s been acting for so long that he’s regarded as part of the fabric.Credit: BBC/BBC Studios/Simon Ridgway
John Chapel is a classically trained actor who, despite having spent a decade with the Royal Shakespeare Company, is enduringly and inescapably famous for his role as a 19th-century gentleman detective in Caesar, a long-running series that he abandoned years earlier. He is grand but polite to most of the people who conflate him with his character – better that than being forgotten – but draws the line at being pulled into a real investigation by young Janie, a lifelong fan. Until, of course, his vanity gets the better of him.
“It is nice to be able to play someone who occasionally displays actorly conceits,” says Spall, with a knowing chuckle. Most actors, he insists, just get on with the job. “But sometimes you do see it in actors who have been removed from their work, where they’re slightly nostalgic about their status. He’s a little bit insecure about all of that, so he tends to over-compensate by trying to reinforce his status all the time.”
Especially with Janie. “They have become friends, but he’s dealing with someone he considers to be a philistine. There’s a Tony Hancock ‘oh you’re all fools’ quality to him. But he’s not a phony because he does what he says he can do, which is understand human nature, the contradictions and subtleties of it, through what he did as an actor.”
Spall as John Chapel and Gwyneth Keyworth as Janie Mallowan in Death Valley.
Janie puts together evidence and crunches data. Chapel reads motives and emotions in between dodging his fans. Spall knows what that’s like. Among film-goers, he is most notable for his collaborations with director Mike Leigh, which include the Cannes winner Secrets & Lies (1996) and his starring turn in Mr Turner (2014), for which he studied painting intensively so that he could wield a brush with conviction.
Early in his career, however, he was household-name-famous among a much broader constituency as annoying Barry in Auf Wiedersehen Pet, a hit television comedy from the 1980s about British builders going to find work in Germany. Spall was then in his mid-20s; he is now 68 and still gets the lines recited back at him by fans in passing.
“The last episode of the first series got 18 million viewers, which is ridiculous,” he says. “I was very famous, but it was an odd juxtaposition because that fame coincided with a period when I was out of work. And it was odd to be associated with a single character, who was regarded as a bit of a wally.”
Spall had another burst of being recognised everywhere as Wormtail from the Harry Potter films. “But I’ve been around for so long now that I’m regarded as part of the fabric. [People are] much less amazed than they used to be because everyone’s got a phone in their pocket, so that whole starstruck thing has changed. Now everyone has the ability to make a program about themselves, so people being on screens is not unusual really. You used to be mobbed in supermarkets, people saying, ‘My God, is that him off the telly?’ That’s all gone, thank God.
Loading
“On the whole, people are just charming. And this is what I do! I’m an actor. It’s my fault. I shouldn’t go on the telly, should I, if I don’t want it?”
At the heart of Death Valley is John and Janie, a quarrelsome pair, who see their own worst aspects in each other. “They’re both stubborn and can both be pedantic and tunnel-minded,” says Keyworth. “But their friendship helps them both, as quite lonely people.” There is a generational gulf between them, Spall adds. “But there is no gap emotionally. They are like siblings.”
So how would they go as detectives in real life? Keyworth has been in several police shows, but never as the sleuth. “I’ve been the victim a few times! I don’t have the character of a detective. I’ve got ADHD, so I can’t keep track of anything. I couldn’t make proper notes.”
Loading
And how would Spall fare? He snorts with laughter. “Shocking,” he says. “I’d let the suspects go. If they just looked a bit sad, I’d feel sorry for them.” That’s too cosy even for Death Valley.
Death Valley is now streaming on BritBox.
