ITV drama

Making great British TV drama is an uphill struggle. Yet Code of Silence is a reminder that, if there’s a smart idea on the table, winning a commission can be a doddle. After the pitch, it took just eight hours for ITV to come back to Mammoth Screen with a “yes”.

“Polly Hill [Head of Drama] and Kevin Lygo [Managing Director, Media and Entertainment] saw immediately that this was a new and arresting way to tell a contemporary story,” says Damien Timmer, Chief Creative Officer and founder of Mammoth Screen, a subsidiary of ITV Studios.

The hidden world of witness protection is fertile ground for programme-makers. “When I started work on Protection, I began to see how clandestine witness protection is,” says Kris Mrksa, lead writer on a new ITV six-part drama.

“I hadn’t grasped how completely witnesses cut ties and start over. And police officers need to hide their own identities ­– if criminals knew who they were, they could follow them to safe houses. That aspect made it feel like espionage; they were spies rather than cops.”

Grace was shot under stringent coronavirus protocols but you would never know an epidemic was sweeping the nation from watching ITV’s new Sunday-night drama. This was as the broadcaster and the show’s producer intended – and immensely pleasing for its star, John Simm. “No one wants to see anything about Covid. It was the most depressingly boring year and we don’t want to see it on film,” he says.

Simm plays detective superintendent Roy Grace, the eponymous hero of Peter James’s bestselling crime novels.

The series, adapted from Graham’s play of the same name, explores the story of the ‘coughing major’, which saw Charles (Matthew Macfadyen), Diana Ingram (Sian Clifford) and Tecwen Whittock (Michael Jibson) cheat their way to a million pounds on the quiz show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

The “audacious heist” took place in 2001, when Major Ingram was a contestant on the show and with the help of his wife Diana and accomplice Whittock, navigated the notoriously difficult quiz to win the top price.