Easter Special
Passenger Sunday, Monday 9.00pm ITV1/ITVX
Actor and screenwriter Andrew Buchan drew on his Bolton roots to create Passenger – his debut drama with a supernatural twist
Andrew Buchan bowls into the canteen of a London publicists’ office, an appealing mix of anticipation and nerves. “What did you think?” he asks after a few pleasantries. His relief when I assure him I enjoyed Passenger is understandable: after two decades of acting (most notably as Broadchurch’s Mark Latimer), the six-part ITV thriller marks the 45-year-old’s screenwriting debut, the culmination of years of “scribbling ideas on the back of bus receipts”. Only recently, though, did he learn that writing was in his blood.
“My dad’s name is John,” he explains. “When guests would come around, he’d gesture at The Thirty-Nine Steps and Prester John on the bookshelves and say, ‘Look at them!’, as if he had something to do with them. We’d be mocking him and going, ‘You are not that John Buchan. This needs to stop!’ He’s in his 80s now, and about a year ago he told me he used to win writing competitions at school. I never knew he had this leaning towards storytelling.”
Passenger is not, let’s be clear, The Thirty-Nine Steps redux. A seemingly routine cop drama – local girl disappears in suspicious circumstances – mutates into something altogether more peculiar when she reappears, bewildered by the fuss she has caused in the isolated Lancashire community of Chadder Vale. DI Riya Ajunwa (Wunmi Mosaku), recently arrived from the Met, takes on this mystery that also involves anti-fracking protests, an online adventure game, an epidemic of hacking coughs and the contents of a delivery lorry. Supernatural overtones and ecological undercurrents jockey with dark comedy and teens wracked with anxiety. The sense that it’s easier to say what Passenger isn’t is echoed by Chadder Vale’s locals, who observe that, “This isn’t Twin Peaks, love!” And then, cheekily, “This isn’t Broadchurch”.
Buchan chuckles. “Two huge influences are Fargo, for juxtaposing the horrific and the mundane, and Stranger Things, where something otherworldly is introduced into a small community and no one believes it. I grew up in Bolton, where people reacted to major events by squashing them with a quip. Presenting the notion of space travel in a Bolton pub would be greeted with ‘Absolute pile of crap, don’t waste your time’. I kept wondering: what would be the worst thing that I could put in a small northern community to stretch their humour to the limit?”
Having been two years ahead of Mosaku at Rada (“She had a northern accent and I always gravitated towards that”), Buchan wrote Riya with her in mind. “I remember her in [2016’s post-Troubl
