This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
At the risk of borrowing straight from Mrs Merton in her famous chat with Debbie McGee, my first question to John Hannah of his new TV role must be: exactly what did attract him to the part of a washed-up bar owner turned detective on the shores of the Mediterranean for the show Benidorm Is Murder?
He laughs. “It sounds like a cliché but it was the script. The dialogue feels believable when you say it. So, it was the script, and it was funny.” He pauses. “And it was the Mediterranean.”
Sure enough, his role of Dennis Crown, a former policeman now running a seaside tavern, furnishes him with plenty of zingers, helping place the show firmly at the upbeat end of a very full TV crime canon. Hannah himself has even parodied the genre with his role of DI Jack Cloth in Touching Cloth.
Today, he agrees that mixing murder with bon mots can be a tough act to pull off. “We know British audiences love these kinds of puzzles, a nice crime thriller. This felt a bit cosy and a bit comedy, which is quite a tricky balance to get right. Sometimes these shows have characters pushed into being weirdo eccentrics for the sake of it. But Benidorm felt believable.
Cloth didn’t have a sense of humour, but Dennis has a kind of dour, Scottish wit and I know people who make these kinds of jokes. They’re all asides about the strangeness of life.” He laughs. “I don’t think I’ve played anything similar to it, although as an actor you’re allowed to be 80 per cent of your character.”
Dennis’s sidekick Rosa (played by Carolina Bécquer), an aspiring actress-turned-waitress obsessed by vintage TV crime shows, references every detective from Miss Marple to Columbo as they set about solving the mysteries that land on their doorstep, and fans of Death in Paradise and its various spin-offs will notice a familiar array of suspects’ pictures lined up, in this case on the dartboard in Dennis’s bar.
It all seems a very deliberate homage to the detective genre, something Hannah likens to “the Easter eggs in the Marvel world, tipping the wink to the viewer about things gone before. And Rosa’s character is very meta with all her TV talk. We just decided to lean into it and embrace it.”
Quirky, yet familiar – what sets this new one apart is all in the title. It’s set and filmed in Benidorm, with Hannah and fellow cast and crew setting up stall for three months late last year. The setting allowed creator and writer Ian Jarvis to include characters we’re not used to seeing in such series, where the crimes are more usually committed in elegant drawing rooms, the suspects stealing away on gravelly drives to the barks of Labradors.
But is Benidorm a breath of fresh air, or a case of middle-class programme makers selling out blue-collar holidaymakers to fund their London homes? Hannah shakes his head. “No, it’s very much a love letter to Benidorm. Ian wanted to write about working-class people who have retired or may just be there for the week, or maybe just on a stag do. It’s surprisingly diverse, and it’s more realistic that Brits would be hot-footing it there rather than the Caribbean. It’s not where I’d necessarily choose to go, but if my parents were still alive, they would love it. Ian’s very conscious of it being a working-class drama.”
Long before he became a famous face (in films like Four Weddings and a Funeral and Sliding Doors, and on TV as the titular detective in Rebus), Hannah came from the stock he describes. His father was a toolmaker, his mother worked at Marks and Spencer, and he counts his blessings he was born at a time when an apprentice electrician like him could change his mind about his future, attend drama school and end up building a career on screen.
“I had a kind of epiphany at college, when I realised I could do me better than anybody else could act me. Then, when I graduated, there were jobs I could get. I wouldn’t necessarily have to be in the Sunday afternoon, BBC adaptation of ‘fill in the blank’. There was still the legacy of Boys from the Black Stuff, TV made by Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. There was that kind of thing, and there isn’t any of that on television any more.”
With such a beginning paying off with an eclectic roll-call of film, TV and voiceover work – and a recurring role in the big-budget Mummy action-adventure franchise (the fourth in the series is on its way) was there ever a plan? “No,” he says immediately. “David Threlfall once said, ‘You can only exercise choice over what you’re offered.’ If you’re not offered the role, it doesn’t make any difference. You can decide to go up for a job or not, and that’s the only kind of agency you have.”
How does Hannah cope with that? “A therapist once noticed that I get lost a lot deliberately on my bike. Similarly, with my acting career, that’s how it’s gone. I have a belief in humanity, I’ve met great people along the way, so I’m comfortable going out, getting lost and letting go of what other people might consider safety nets. I’m comfortable in myself.”
With his family – wife actress Joanna Roth, twins Gabriel and Astrid, now 22 – he has for a long time lived in London. What does Scotland mean to him now, is it still home? “I think it’s somewhere I used to live,” he says slowly, although he agrees his accent, unchanged after decades away from his native East Kilbride, has done him no harm. For six series, he has been the narrator of Race Across the World, a show he says he’s delighted to be part of.
“I sit in the studio every week, watch their trips and think, I want to go there. It gives me wanderlust. I enjoy watching the show myself, as I don’t usually see the whole episode, only the scripted parts, when I’m narrating. So I can sit and watch it with my wife and enjoy the travelogue nature of it. Plus the idea of getting lost appeals to me.” Well, of course it does. He smiles. “That doesn’t sound far from the tree.”
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If he were to do the show himself, who would he choose as his travel partner? He muses. “It’s probably pretty boring, but I’d maybe take one of the kids so that I could get them off their phone.”
Back in Benidorm, production meant long days of filming in the resort itself followed by evenings in a neighbouring village apartment learning his lines: “My denouement script for the final episode was 18 pages. I spent weeks learning it!” he remembers clearly. How did he choose to spend any precious downtime? “I had my bike, and at weekends I’d go cycling in the mountains, come back and jump in the sea for a swim.” And, presumably, frequently and happily getting lost, before finding his way home again.
Benidorm Is Murder begins on Thursday 30 July at 9pm on 5.
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