Back on the beat

CRACKER star Robbie Coltrane is back on duty in ITV’s new crime drama Murderland, which asks the question: can you ever move on from terrible events that befall you as a child, and grow up and make a new life?

Or will you be forever haunted, unable to really live as an adult until you know the truth?

Set in 1994 and the present day, it examines a horrific murder from three perspectives, and features Coltrane as a detective still plagued by his memories of the investigation.

It is a fascinating journey into obsession and revenge, and Harry Potter star Coltrane is excited about taking on such an emotional part.

“David Pirie and I talked about the idea for Murderland some years ago, and making television we’d like to watch. It was as simple as that,” he says.

“We talked about what gripped us and what has particularly gripped us about film noir and Hitchcock and all those things. It’s the idea of characters who are in some sort of conflict and appear to be one thing but may in fact be something else, characters who confuse the audience in one sense and then treat them in another. The story throws up enormous moral conflicts.”

The actor and occasional presenter has been seen as larger-than-life Hagrid in the Potter franchise in recent years, but what does he want to do next? “There are still a lot of things I want to do with my life,” he says.

“I’m very driven and being ambitious is always looked down on in Britain, I feel.

People feel you want more then you deserve.

I certainly have a lot of things I still want to do. I want to create things, because that’s always been in my blood and that’s why I went to art school.

“My children are like that, they both make things all the time. I think most people want to create things.

“I watched an extraordinary programme about very early paintings in France and even when we were just sitting around the fire hoping for a buffalo to pass, people were painting on walls. I think it’s a very deep thing, wanting to make things.”

IMAGINE making a lifestyle choice so profound it literally changes your identity. Now imagine making that decision when you are still a child.

As experts consider a review of UK guidelines for treating transgender children, Age 8 and Wanting a Sex Change follows the stories of several youngsters in the US who believe they were born in the wrong body.

In the US, hormone blockers can be prescribed to children under 16 to prevent the onset of puberty, while they can then undergo treatment to change gender.

It’s a huge decision, but there are a remarkable number of children who are making it.

The film tells the story of eight-year-old Josie, who was born a boy, but has been living as a girl for two years since he revealed the full extent of his feelings about his identity to his mother.

Kyla is also eight and was also born a boy, but has now grown his hair and is preparing to return to school dressed as a girl for the first time.

GLAMOUR’S Golden Age takes us back to the Twenties and Thirties, an era when glamour conjured up images of cruise liners, vampish screen stars and daring jazz musicians, as well as the birth of mass entertainment and media.

But just why did the decades between the wars become associated with decadence?

Kingdom and Spooks star Hermione Norris narrates the first episode, which concentrates on how architecture and design reflected – and on occasion, even shaped – the spirit of the times. It examines the impact of the frivolous Art Deco to the more functional Modernism, and finds that both were in keeping in an era when people were ready to move on from the horror of the First World War and start on the cocktails.