BBC Announces, Provides Information for, Three Crime Dramas

The BBC published three "press packs" last week, introducing and expanding on crime dramas in development by the network.

The Field of Blood is adapted from the novel by Denise Mina and is set in 1982. Would-be journalist Paddy Meehan (Jayd Johnson), a young copygirl working in a Glasgow newspaper office is stuck in an almost exclusively male-dominated world of limited opportunities and cynicism. Paddy dreams of becoming an investigative journalist, believing that in miscarriages of justice, reporters are sometimes the only hope. She seizes an opportunity to kick-start her career and becomes embroiled in a dark murder case. For Paddy, it's the opportunity of a lifetime but it comes at a great personal cost. (Note: Though it isn't explicitly stated as such, we think this is a made-for-television movie adaptation of the book and not a multi-part series … though it could easily be one. The Field of Blood is the first in the Paddy Meehan series of mysteries by Mina, of which there are currently three entries.)

Two more feature-length films have been commissioned for George Gently, in addition to the two that are already scheduled to begin production next year. Based on a character created by crime novelist Alan Hunter, who featured the character in a large number of books published from 1955 through 1999, the series stars Martin Shaw as Commander George Gently, a 1960s-era Scotland Yard cop transferred from the city to England's rural North Country.

Finally, the network introduces its newest crime drama series, The Body Farm. A spin-off (of sorts) from Waking the Dead — and no doubt inspired to no small degree by the series of novels by Jefferson Bass and one by Patricia Cornwell, which are set in and around the "body farm", a real scientific facility at the University of Tennessee — Tara FitzGerald reprises her role as forensic expert Dr. Eve Lockhart. Her base is a remote farm from which, with the aid of donor bodies, she conducts research on behalf of Police forces around the world into the many ways in which murders can be committed and sometimes disguised. As the harsh economic climate eats into their funding, and the Home Office's own forensic facility falls victim to cutbacks, Eve accepts an offer by Detective Inspector Hale (Keith Allen) to leave the body farm to the hidden world of academic research, and work on the visceral front line of murder detection. Eve, of course, is no stranger to murder in its many forms, but her new team find themselves rapidly thrust into an unexpectedly brutal new world.

(Source: BBC Press Office.)