London Notebook | 10 December 2015

I’ve spent much of the autumn and winter shooting my new TV series for BBC1. New Blood looks at the so-called ‘Y’ generation and focuses on two 25-year-olds who fight crime but who spend as much time worrying about their university loans, finding somewhere to live, arguing with each other and trying to kick-start their careers. It’s been fun watching our two young stars — Mark Strepan and Ben Tavassoli, watch those names — grow into the parts and I’ve thrown everything at them. They’ve cycled and run miles, been shot at, drugged, kidnapped, drenched, tortured and blown up. They’ve jumped off the roof of a hotel, escaped from a burning car and fought naked in a Turkish hammam. To their credit, they’ve never once complained . . . but then, of course, they’re young.

Which is more than you can say for the producers who gazed in horror when they saw the word ‘London’ in my scripts. They had good reason. Shooting in our capital city has become a nightmare — we were forced to move Foyle’s War, first to Dublin and then to Liverpool. Part of the trouble is that there’s no central point of contact —we had to negotiate separately with 32 separate boroughs for every permit and parking suspension. Worse still, private companies have sprung up as self-styled ‘film location agencies’ who make it their business to ring-fence everything from well-known landmarks to domestic properties. This has pushed prices up to the extent that only the big American producers can afford to shoot here. Marvel Comics are all over town with their spandex-covered heroes, outbidding us (Thwack! Kerpow!) at every turn. You’d have thought Boris Johnson might have done a little more to help local film-makers show off the city of which he is so rightly proud.