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Brighton-based detective series Grace will return to our screens for its fifth season on ITV on Sunday, April 6 at 8pm.
Four new episodes are lined up for that all-important primetime Sunday night slot crowning a remarkable run of success for the series and for the books behind them. April also sees the start of filming on the sixth season in Brighton, another four episodes which will be screened next year.
Based on the best-selling novels from Peter James, series five comprises Dead If You Don't, Dead At First Sight, Need You Dead and Find Them Dead, TV episode numbers 13, 14, 15 and 16 in the series – which will be followed by episodes 17-20 next year on ITV.
As Peter says, very few series reach a fifth season: “But the really fortunate thing is that the loyalty of my fans is holding up the audiences. The pattern tends to be that the first season of something does well and then the second starts to tail off and so on but really the fortunate thing with Grace is that I do feel that my books on the whole have got stronger, and it is the books that are the blueprint for the TV episodes. The pattern is that usually a series will be scrambling around for new ideas at some point, but with this they have got the blueprint of the books. We know that the books work. We know that the books have a structure. Obviously you have to change things for TV. That has to be the case but I am wonderfully well consulted when changes have to be made, and it is such a great team.
“Really the key thing, and I know this from my experience as a producer on many films, is that films work or don't work because of the chemistry or the lack of it between the principal characters. You can get the best actors in the business but if there is no chemistry between them it just won't work. But we are so incredibly lucky because the chemistry between
John Simm (as Detective Superintendent Roy Grace), Richie Campbell (as DS Glenn Branson) and Zoë Tapper (as Cleo Morey) is just magical. You genuinely feel that Roy and Glenn are great mates because John and Richie are great mates off screen. And you really feel that Roy and Cleo are in love. The air crackles between them. And if you can find that chemistry, then it makes all the difference. I remember someone saying and I think it might have been Peter Ustinov that Marlene Dietrich's understudy does everything Marlene Dietrich does except that thing that Marlene Dietrich does, and that’s what you get with John Simm. He is just absolutely ideal. We had lunch a couple of weeks ago and he was saying to me that he can't wait to start filming again and that Glenn can’t wait either and that Zoë can't wait too.”
Another element of the show’s success is the fact that Brighton itself is one of the stars of the series: “I remember when I started writing the Grace series my publisher at the time said ‘We are going to make Brighton as much a part of this as your physical characters’, and we have. And our great fortune was that Brighton has hardly ever been used despite it being such a visual place with stunning beautiful architecture and such a beautiful coastline... and also some pretty horrible places. It has got such character and such contrasts.”
So as season five airs and as season six starts to film, Peter describes himself as thrilled to bits: “It is a dream to come true.”
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