Lancashire-based screenwriter and co-creator of The Bay Daragh Carville, on writing and filming on Morecambe Bay Lancashire

Daragh Carville is a playwright and screenwriter, best known for co-creating and writing the ITV crime drama The Bay, filmed in Morecambe and the Morecambe Bay area of Lancashire. First broadcast on ITV in 2019, series 1 attracted an average audience of over seven million viewers, and viewing figures continue to grow with each series. The Bay has been sold to over 100 countries worldwide and UK audiences are eagerly awaiting Series 5,  promised for the start of 2025.

Daragh, who lives with his family in nearby Lancaster gave this exclusive interview to Marketing Lancashire as part of the #StarringGREATBritain campaign.

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When and what brought you to Lancaster?  

My wife – the novelist Jo Baker – is from Arkholme, a village in the Lune valley, so we’d been visiting since we got together, though we were living in Belfast at the time. But then – in 2005 – Jo got a job at Lancaster University so we moved over. And by then we’d had our son Dan, and soon after that our daughter Aoife, so we ended up staying while they went to school etc.

How has Lancashire inspired/influenced your writing?

Place is very important to my writing so being based in Lancashire for the last twenty years has definitely had an influence. There’s a vibrant arts scene in Lancaster, with the university and the Dukes Theatre and Litfest and so on, so I was keen to tap into that as soon as we moved over. That ultimately led to me writing a play for the Dukes, a co-production with the Oldham Colosseum, about the Lancashire film pioneers Mitchell and Kenyon. That was the first time I’d really written in the voice of this place and it was a great experience, one of the highlights of my writing life. And then not long after that I started work on The Bay.

When did the idea of The Bay first come to mind?

I’d been thinking about the importance of genre in TV drama. Coming from a theatre background I didn’t think of myself as a genre writer but in TV drama genre is everything, and crime is the biggest genre of all. So I’d been on the lookout for an idea for a crime drama, but one that wasn’t just a procedural show, one that was rooted in community and family. And then I happened to come across – in a news report on the radio – a story about a Family Liaison Officer, and I realised that this role could enable me to tell crime stories that were also family stories.

Around the same time I came across a map of the UK made up of titles of TV series. As you can imagine London was dense with titles – Only Fools and Horses, Minder, Eastenders – and so were many of the big cities and regions. But Morecambe Bay – the area I lived in – was a blank on the map. And I was basically offended by that! So I determined there and then to do whatever I could to put Morecambe on the map.

What do you like most about Morecambe Bay and the area around Morecambe Bay?

I think it’s the combination of great beauty on the one hand – not just the scenery, though that’s breathtaking, but also the built environment, beautiful old buildings like the Midland Hotel and the Winter Gardens – and a kind of grittiness on the other. Morecambe had its heyday when it was one of the UK’s leading seaside destinations but with the arrival of cheap flights it lost its reason-to-be a bit. So there’s a kind of faded grandeur to the place, a slight sense of being left behind, or overlooked. Hopefully that will change with the advent of the Eden Project, which promises to create a new kind of destination for the 21st century. And I hasten to add that there’s also a huge amount of pride and energy in the place, and a buzzing artistic and cultural community, and brilliant festivals like the recent Bay International Film Festival. So overall it’s a very distinctive place, and I thought lent itself really well to TV drama.

Looking back at series 1 – how was that first experience of filming in Morecambe for you and for the cast?

I remember before we filmed the first series I took part in a Q & A at the Winter Gardens to talk about the show, and one of the concerns that came up from the audience was a worry that we would present the area in a bad light. I pointed out that since the show is a crime drama it would inevitably go to dark places but I was keen to emphasise the fact that The Bay is also a celebration of the place, and that we’d show it in all its beauty and complexity and reflect the warmth and pride of the community. I hope we’ve managed to do that. I hope we have.

Most of the cast weren’t from the area as such and were coming to it for the first time, but they took to it straight away. And the community has taken us to its heart too, right from the start.

Once filming begins – what is your role?

It depends where we’re at with the filming process. We tend to shoot in two blocks – episodes 1, 2 and 3, then a quick break and onto eps 4, 5 and 6. So when we’re shooting Block One I’m usually busy working on scripts for Block Two, so I don’t get to set very often. But by the time we’re shooting Block Two, my work as a writer is (fingers crossed) more or less done, so I’m able to spend a bit more time on set. But the role of the writer on set is a bit of an odd one, because everyone else is very busy and has very clearly defined roles, whereas the writer has usually finished their work so is just getting in the way and eating the biscuits. That said, I’m also an Executive Producer on the show so I do now have a more practical hands-on role, liaising with the directors and actors and crew. (But I do stiil get in the way and eat the biscuits.)

Has filming in Morecambe changed over time?

I think we’ve become part of the furniture now! Or part of the family. Filming in the area was a novelty when we first started but we’ve done five series now, and there have been other shows shot around here too – there was a Netflix drama Stay Close with James Nesbitt filmed in Morecambe and some of Peaky Blinderswas shot in Lancaster – so people have got used to it now. We do cause disruption from time to time – we had to shut Marine Road to traffic for a couple of days during series 5 – but people are generally very accommodating. I think they’re proud of the show really, and so happy to help.

What are the advantages to knowing the territory, understanding the people and culture of the place, when you sit in front of that blank page/screen ?

It definitely helps to know the place intimately when writing. Our show is unusual in some ways in that it’s set in a real place, whereas many TV dramas are set in imagined places, like the fictional town of Wetherfield in Coronation Street, or Walford in Eastenders. But the Morecambe in The Bay is the real Morecambe (though we do sometimes take a bit of dramatic licence.)

So when I’m writing I’ll often be thinking of real locations. In series 5 for instance we go to the Nuclear Power Station in Heysham. I think knowing the place well opens up story opportunities that might not otherwise occur to you.

What lies ahead for The Bay and for Daragh Carville?

Well, that really depends on the audience! TV is a bit of a numbers game, so ratings are very important. But if the ratings for series 5 hold up we’ve certainly got more stories we’d like to tell. So watch this space!

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More information on Daragh

Daragh’s other TV credits include Being Human (BBC3, 2013), 6Degrees (BBC NI, 2013/15) and The Smoke (Kudos/Sky One, 2014).

His plays include Language Roulette (Tinderbox Theatre Company, 1996/7), Observatory (Peacock, 1999), Family Plot (Tinderbox, 2005), This Other City (Tinderbox, 2009), The Life and Times of Mitchell and Kenyon (Dukes Theatre Lancaster / Oldham Coliseum, 2014) and History (Tinderbox, 2016).

His films are Middletown (dir. Brian Kirk, 2006) and Cherrybomb (dir. Lisa Barros d’Sa / Glen Leyburn, 2008.)

Work for radio includes Regenerations (BBC Radio 3, 2001), which was nominated for the Richard Imison Award, and Dracula (Radio 4, 2003) starring Michael Fassbender.

Daragh Carville has won both the Stewart Parker and the Meyer Whitworth awards for playwriting and has twice been nominated Best Writer in the Irish Film and TV Awards. He teaches Scriptwriting at Birkbeck, University of London.