I
rvine Welsh has a recommendation
for your next TV binge. It’s called
Crime and he’s quite the fan. “I’ve
just seen nothing like this ever on
British television. It seems to me to
be so different from so much of the
stuff that I’ve seen. It’s a game-changer.”
High praise indeed, with one small
caveat — he wrote it. He also adapted it
from his own 2008 bestselling novel, so
he’d be unlikely to tell you it’s a pile of
pish. But then Welsh knows a thing or
two about changing the game. On the
skyline of modern British fiction, few
novels loom larger than Trainspotting,
an On the Road for the Ecstasy genera-
tion. When Trainspotting was made into
a film by Danny Boyle, it achieved instant
cult status. Since then Welsh’s work has
outraged, appalled and provoked in
equal measure, but he has never, ever
been dull. So perhaps he deserves a fair
hearing on his first TV series.
“I’m more excited about Crime than
I’ve been about anything that I’ve done
in a while,” he says. “I hope and I
expect and I want this show to do for
British TV what Trainspotting did for
British cinema and what the novel did
for British literature.”
Crime is the first TV series that
Welsh has written, and after 11 novels
and four collections of short stories he
has enjoyed the gearchange. “Writing
novels you have total freedom, but it’s
also quite lonely,” he says. “Whereas in
TV right from the start everybody’s
involved. It’s all about criticism: there
are all kinds of constraints on you in
television, but in a way it’s fun to work
around those constraints with people.
The collaborative thing is fabulous —
it’s the only way you learn. You can sit
and type away in the ghetto of your
own mind, but when you work with
other people, that’s when you actually
start to get better as a writer, I believe.”
The series tells the story of DI Ray
Lennox, played by Dougray Scott,
a cannonball of a man on the trail of
a paedophile sex offender. “When
I first wrote Crime I wanted to write the
most over-the-top kind of horrendous
book that I could write — I wanted to
top Filth [his 1998 novel].”
Anyone who has read Filth, which
was made into a film in 2013 with James
McAvoy, knows that’s some ambition —
the lead character, Bruce Robinson, is a
corrupt, vicious sociopath who shares
the narrative duties with his own tape-
worm. But the book also introduced
Lennox, who then reappeared in Crime
ten years later. Lennox was a cocaine
addict who had himself been abused as
a youth, a man deep in the darkness
“groping for the light switch”, as WelshMY TRAINSPOTTING COPS
He starts reading a poem called
Healing by DH Lawrence from his
phone — you can look it up yourself. He
has a great delivery. “He wrote that
after the Industrial Revolution,” Gar-
field explains. “It was as if his society
was saying you do have a soul — but it
doesn’t really matter. What matters is
how many units you produce.”
In an hour Garfield mentions Rilke,Bill Hicks, Neo in The Matrix, the rap-
per Travis Scott, Judy Garland, Simone
Biles, James O’Brien, Adam Curtis,
Rumi and The Goonies. A man for both
high and pop culture, he litters names
not to show off but to share.
We talk about The Social Network, inwhich he played Eduardo Savarin, the
Facebook co-founder and Mark Zucker-
berg’s former friend. “This is going off
on one,” he begins about Zuckerberg.
“But if the fish head is rotten the body
will follow. I think you can find all of
the dysfunction the platform created,
how we disconnect from each other
and empathy — well, I think you can
find all of that dysfunction in the head.
It trickles down and I think that is what
is being exposed right now.”
We finish on something Garfield toldme in 2017 — that “I feel like a bit of a
f***ing mess”. How is he now? He
smiles. “It’s been four years and there’s
been an endless amount of things that
have changed,” he says. “For all of us
and for me. And I think the greatest
service I could give is to say, ‘Own the
messiness.’ So, sure, I’m still a mess — I
have no idea what’s going on a lot of the
time. But there’s nothing wrong with
that. I’m on a path that is pathless.”
He mentions his mother, Lynn, whodied two years ago. “Something
changed in my psyche with the loss of
my mother,” he explains. “An aware-
ness of the shortness of life. We’re
driven in our twenties. It is a vital
energy — we stake our claim. Climb the
mountain. Slay the dragon. Something
changes in your thirties and the dream
shifts. My mum gave me so much, but
one of the main things was to look for
opportunities for humility. And to fol-
low the things that matter, rather than
the things that we’re told matter.”
Which reminds me of Larson — a
role for which you can struggle to sepa-
rate character from actor. Surprisingly
to many, Larson was straight. “People
do imagine he was gay,” Garfield says.
“Which was a compliment to him.”
There was a backlash, accusing him of
“straight-washing queer lives”. But Gar-
field says Larson was just part of New
York’s gay community, and an empa-
thetic artist whose friends were dying.
Still, Rent was written 30 years ago.
Does Garfield think a straight man
could write a show like that now? “My
hope is the message is more important
than the messenger,” he says. “But
that’s just me.” c
Tick, Tick ... Boom! is in selected cinemas
now and on Netflix from Nov 19
The author Irvine Welsh tells Benji Wilson about reinventing the TV detective
Crime
mastermind
Irvine Welsh| TELEVISION
puts it. In the TV adaptation it’s Lennox
who takes centre stage.
“It’s the biggest unravelling on TV of
toxic masculinity and that psyche. It’s
not the good guys trying to catch the
bad guys. It’s the f***ed-up guys trying
to catch the more f***ed-up guys.”
Welsh laid down rules to try to avoid
cop show cliché — we’re in contempo-
rary Edinburgh, not London; none of
his coppers says “guv” or “ma’am”,
and few would look out of place in
one of their own line-ups. “I wanted
them all to have massive psychological
problems. They’re all like the criminals,
but in a way worse — they’re sneaky,
devious, nasty and misanthropic.”
The setting is significant. I ask Welsh
and his star Scott whether they think
that Scottish stories are adequately
represented on British TV. “Not by
a long way,” Scott says. “We’re margin-
alised to an extent that annoys me. We
have these incredible stories and they
deserve to be told.” The broadcasters
fail in their remit to represent the
entire country. “They are supposed to
provide a platform for us and they
don’t.” Although Welsh has lived away
from Scotland for a long time — ten
years in the US and five in Ireland —
he agrees. “The argument hasn’t
advanced. I think in some ways it’s
probably got worse, not just for
Scotland but for different
voices, different cultures
within the UK.”
When we meet I’ve
only seen episode one
of Crime, and the first
hour, at least, seems
fairly conventional.
But Welsh has a
retort. “In Britain
these kind of shows
are more police pro-
cedural. In America, with
True Detective and things
like that, they’re much
more psychological and
character-driven. We use
the procedural thing to get
into the darkness of these
characters.”
And he’s right. After
a few episodes Crime
descends deep into the
Welshiverse, a place inside
his head where “chaos has
always reigned”, he says.
Not everyone will like it; not
everyone will get it — which
you sense is precisely as he
would want it. cCrime is streaming on Britbox
from ThursdayHappy Valley
A middle-aged policewoman in
a realistic northern small town living
a credible, difficult life. Nothing
obviously transgressive in Sally
Wainwright’s masterpiece, but the
perfect counterpoint to the Identikit
blokey cop show — and back for
a third season next year.Giri/Haji
Stunning London/Tokyo hybrid that
looked and played like nothing
before or since. And so inevitably
cancelled after one outing.Line of Duty
Easy to forget how fresh LoD felt in
its first few series, including sudden
character deaths, bravura plotting
(“Urgent. Exit. Required”)
and those brilliant,
knuckle-gnawingly tense
interview scenes.No Offence
Paul Abbott, of course,
turned the precinct model
on its head with
this scabrous
new take on
how a cop
squad talks,
works and
functions. Jo
Scanlan’s Viv
Deering was
one of the
great small-
screen DIs.A Touch of Cloth
A spoof so good
that it instantly
rendered almost
all police dramas
ever made
unwatchable.
Charlie Brooker
picked apart the
detective genre
and left no trope
or cliché
unburnt.FIVE BRITISH CRIME
DRAMAS THAT BROKE
THE MOULD