DEAD RECKONING

LUTHER CREATOR NEIL CROSS HAUNTS US WITH A TALE OF GHOSTS AND GUILT IN THE SISTER

- NICK SETCHFIELD

I spend my life being cripplingly terrified of ghosts, and the dark, and being alone,” confesses Neil Cross, on the line from New Zealand, safe in daylight while SFX burns the bulbs against a British night. “When I was 25, that was winsome and interesting to say. Now I’m 51, it’s just weird!

Darkness to me is like turbulence for a nervous flyer. It’s a deeply unpleasant experience that I’ve never accommodated myself to.”

It’s a surprising admission, and not just for a 50-something. As a TV screenwriter Cross has mapped his fair share of darkness, most memorably across five seasons of urban crime drama Luther. But while Idris Elba’s tenacious DCI confronted psychological shadows, the sunless mazes of the human mind, new ITV drama The Sister tells us that the dark conceals things that are rather more inexplicable…

Originally announced as Because The Night (“That was focus-grouped by people who don’t know Patti Smith records, and it wasn’t liked!”) the four-part series is based on Burial, a novel Cross wrote a decade ago.

“It’s always been a favourite story of mine, in as much as it came to me very quickly,” he tells SFX. “This is a bizarre thing to say, given the subject matter of the story, but it’s the most autobiographical story I’ve ever written. And of all the people I’ve made up in one medium or another, Nathan is the character that I most closely identify with.”