Crash course

HAVE you got five nights to spare? If so, ITV1 would like the pleasure of your company at a major road accident with multiple fatalities.

Those neck-stretchers who believe that watching road crashes, or rather the aftermath of terrible smashes, is a form of entertainment should be well satisfied.

Collision is what executives called “event television”, with the five episodes stripped across the week. BBC1 did it with Criminal Justice and Torchwood with impressive results ratings-wise. Now ITV takes the same route.

It is, inevitably, a slow and bitty first episode as the various characters and their stories are introduced and, eventually, they each get behind the wheel or climb into the passenger seat for the smashing eight-vehicle crash that concludes the opening episode.

The biggest question is whether those involved will be interesting enough to keep you watching the rest of the week.

They include a dodgy bloke in a white van, an industrial spy, a millionaire and policemen in a pursuit car.

Investigating is DI John Tolin, played by Douglas Henshall in a sort of trance to indicate that he’s back at work after a traumatic incident caused him to have months away from the office.

You can pass the time during the dull moments by putting names to familiar faces. That girl from Being Human, that chap from Whitechapel, that McGann brother, that chap from Corrie and Strictly, and that Sylvia Syms.

For Henshall, it marks a return to ITV screens after being killed off in Saturday night drama Primeval so he could concentrate more on film and theatre work.

He gives the game away about his Collision character by revealing why Tolin looks so miserable and unhappy to be back at work. “His wife was killed and his daughter was crippled in a car crash.

They got hit by a drunk driver and that’s why he’s not been at work for nine months and the first day he comes in, he has to deal with a car crash,” he explains.

“I suppose like most men of a certain age or a certain type, therapy or counselling wouldn’t be something that he’d enter into. Most men try to find some kind of meaning in the job they do.

“So he becomes quite obsessed by the people who are involved in this car crash as a means of trying to work out what happened to him. So they become like a surrogate family for him, I think.”

Others in the cast include Kate Ashfield, Paul McGann, Claire Rushbrook, David Bamber and Phil Davis.

OVER the course of five episodes, the lives of the victims are all interwoven, and as DI Tolin and his team sift through the wreckage, a series of revelations about the victims emerge: from Government cover-ups to smuggling and murder.

“Working on this drama did make me realise the extent to which an accident affects so many different lives – those are the things you don’t think about when you are driving,” says Henshall.

“When you go past a traffic accident, you do slow down and have a look and then move on. But you don’t think about the impact on the people involved, either the victims or their families. There are 72 characters in this and I liked the way it kind of knitted itself together – it is incredibly clever, grand, operatic and very visual.”

One scene was filmed on a major dual carriageway just outside London, early one Sunday morning. Henshall and Ashfield are seen walking along the trafficfree carriageway to investigate the scene of the crash which killed three people.

“The velocity of cars passing by as we waited to film our scenes on this busy dual carriageway was frightening,” he says.

“We were working very much in conjunction with the police, who put in a rolling road block while we filmed the scene. We had to wait for the police to announce that the road was blocked before we started.

“Suddenly all the traffic stopped in both directions and silence just descended on it. It was very eerie.”