From the BBC Press Office:
The BBC today unveiled highlights of its Winter/Spring drama offering for 2010. The line-up will provide a huge range of styles and themes with something for all audiences to enjoy.
On BBC One, Billie Piper stars in A Passionate Woman and Idris Elba stars as Luther in the eponymous new take on police drama.
There will also be the much anticipated new series of Doctor Who featuring Matt Smith.
On BBC Two, as part of the channel’s Eighties Season, there will be an exciting adaptation of the Martin Amis novel Money and Abi Morgan‘s new drama Royal Wedding about life in a Welsh village set against the backdrop of the wedding of the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer.
There will also be Dominic Savage‘s first fully-scripted drama, Dive, co-written with playwright Simon Stephens.
BBC Three sees the return of the award-winning Being Human alongside new lesbian drama Lip Service.
And, on BBC Four, Christopher Eccleston stars as John Lennon in Lennon Naked, the channel’s latest biopic.
Ben Stephenson, Controller, BBC Drama Commissioning, said: “I believe that the Winter/Spring line-up underlines our reputation as the home of Britain’s most creative and exciting drama. It is the place where new and established writers can realise their most imaginative work.
“Across our four channels, there are bold, modern new series and serials alongside unique and challenging single pieces. Where else will you find a Time Lord, a rock star and a vampire all in one season?”
The dramas that feature are:
BBC One
Luther
A new kind of crime thriller for British TV starring Idris Elba (The Wire). In each exciting and fast-moving story, the murderer’s identity is known from the start, focussing the drama on the psychic duel between hunter and quarry, who sometimes have more in common than either would like to think.
Five Days
In the second series of this award-winning drama, a tiny newborn baby is abandoned in the toilets of a Yorkshire hospital. At the same time, the Trans-Pennine commuter train is halted by a suicidal jumper. Are they connected? From this moment on, the lives of those onboard the train and in the hospital will be changed irrevocably, not least for DC Laurie Franklin (Suranne Jones), off-duty that day but travelling on the train with her mum (Anne Reid), who is recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
Five Daughters
A three-part drama serial by acclaimed writer Stephen Butchard (House Of Saddam), Five Daughters (working title) is a sensitive portrait of events surrounding the discovery of five young women tragically murdered in Ipswich in 2006. Made with the co-operation of Suffolk Police, and other agencies involved in the case, this factually-based drama will tell the story of three of the women’s lives through the eyes of family members and friends, as well as following the inside story of the police investigation.
Doctor Who
A new series, a new Doctor and more intergalactic adventures for the nation’s favourite sci-fi hero.
Ashes To Ashes
Gene Hunt is back in all his Eighties splendour for the final series of this hugely-popular series which promises more twists and turns than ever before.
The Silence
A deaf girl witnesses a murder in this new four-part drama. Eighteen-year-old Amelia Edwards (Genevieve Barr) has recently been fitted with a cochlear implant, enabling her to hear, but she struggles to accept that she has a place in the hearing world. Breaking free from her over-protective parents (Gina McKee – In The Loop, Fiona’s Story; and Hugh Bonneville – Lost In Austen), she goes to stay with her party-loving cousins, homicide detective uncle Jim (Douglas Henshall – Collision, Primeval) and warm-hearted aunt Maggie (Dervla Kirwan – Ondine, Moving On). Amelia witnesses the audacious murder of a policewoman, and is reluctantly propelled further into a loud and frightening world. Jim is assigned the case and, when she identifies a police officer on the drugs squad as one of the killers, he urgently needs to protect his niece. If his colleagues find out what she has witnessed, she will be in extreme danger from the very people he works with. But, by keeping her a secret, he will jeopardise his own position in the force and put his whole family at risk.
A Passionate Woman
Billie Piper (Doctor Who, Secret Diary Of A Call Girl, The Shadow In The North) and Sue Johnston (The Royle Family, The Turn Of The Screw) return to BBC One to play two stages in the life of Betty, a wife and mother who falls deeply in love with a Polish neighbour with disastrous consequences. Written by Kay Mellor.
The Deep
James Nesbitt, Minnie Driver and Goran Visnjic star in a five-part thriller set thousands of feet below the Arctic ice. Simon Donald‘s story follows the crew of an oceanographic submarine as they search the final frontiers of Earth for unknown and remarkable life forms before inexplicable circumstances then cause catastrophe to strike.
Survivors
Series two follows the adventures of a small group of people thrown together in the aftermath of a devastating virus that has wiped out most of the world’s population.
(continues at BBC press office web page)
