You’re best known to many viewers for appearing in the BBC comedy The Fast Show, but have spent the last decade focusing on young adult novels (the Young Bond series and The Enemy). Why tackle Jekyll and Hyde for TV and why now?
I was actually in the thick of writing my book The End and thinking, “great, I’m coming to the end of my book series and I’ll be able to take a bit of time off”, when ITV asked me to meet them. They wanted to develop something for the weekend early evening drama slot and knew I understood the demographic after Young Bond. They said they wanted something with action, adventure, fantasy, horror, humour, and I said, “something like Jekyll and Hyde?” and they said, “brilliant, yes that would be perfect for us, can you go and write it?”
You sound surprised …
I was surprised they hired me to do it all. I still keep expecting them to say, “I’m really sorry, we meant that other bloke.” It was really off the back of A Caribbean Mystery, the Miss Marple adaptation I did in 2014. This is a departure for ITV, they don’t usually make stuff like this.
So where do you start with Jekyll and Hyde?
The first thing I did was read the book! It’s one of the books you think you’ve read because there are so many adaptations, but it wasn’t at all what I was expecting.
And what did you take from the story?
Two things struck me, a) the reason it’s so enduring, and Jekyll is the third-most filmed character of all time (after Dracula and Sherlock) is because it’s a very contemporary idea. Monsters aren’t things from outside – we are the monsters. We all have dark urges within us and we’re all capable of doing terrible things but most of us repress them and actually if we could get away with it we probably would do all these things. And b) that it was the inspiration for superheroes; this idea that you can change into someone who is physically different. Obviously the Incredible Hulk but even Superman and Spiderman, and so much contemporary drama is about keeping up a respectable front whilst having a secret second life – look at Tony Soprano or Walter White in Breaking Bad.
Your Jekyll is actually the grandson of the original Dr Henry Jekyll. Why?
I had to prove that there was enough of a story for a 10-hour series, so I created a bigger world. There are two competing organisations fighting for Jekyll’s soul. On one side, the MIO is a secret government organisation, a force of repression, whose job it is to get rid of the monsters. On the other side, there’s Tenebrae, an organisation of monsters trying to revive their status of being gods.
It’s quite a gang of monsters you’ve got there …
I thought, if I’m expecting people to buy into the idea that the central character is a monster then it gives me carte blanche to put in more monsters and the 1930s was the golden age of American horror movies with Dracula, Frankenstein … so we’ve got our equivalents of zombies, werewolves and mummies and a few of my own thrown in. What I’ve tried to do is not rationalise or give a full scientific explanation, but make them consistent with the world around them.
How challenging was it keeping the action suitable for all the family?
It is early evening family drama and the central character is theoretically the most evil man in the world, but he’s also a conflicted superhero. We’ve created monsters who are worse than him. You have to unleash your inner child when you’re writing these things. Ian Fleming once said he thought the success of Bond was down to him having an adolescent mind, so he’d be able to write ridiculous fantasies without a grownup mind saying, “well that’s a bit far fetched”.
You used to get feedback from your three sons when you were writing young adult novels – did you get any input from them for this?
I showed them bits and pieces. They’d say, “can’t you just show us when it’s all finished?” You know, a bloke would come on in a green outfit and I’d say, “he’ll be edited out and he’s going to have a monster’s body.” I used to read them passages of Young Bond. If they fell asleep, I’d know there was too much talking and I’d need to kill someone or put in another car chase.
Why did you decide to set this, like Young Bond, in the 1930s?
Because it’s unexpected; you don’t expect to see a fantasy drama with guys in nice hats and three-piece suits fighting weird monsters. We could have set it in foggy Victorian London with floozies on street corners, but I think we’ve seen enough of that. We could have set it in a contemporary world – but how do you get a sense of madness and fantasy and fun in a world of constant CCTV?
It wouldn’t be a Charlie Higson adaptation without humour. Can we expect lots of gags?
I like writing humour and it’s why I think something like Coronation Street has always been successful, it acknowledges the fact that throughout the day we laugh a lot. If you look at some cheaply made movies – Superman IV is a great example – it’s not the fact the special effects are bad, it’s because there is no humour in it. If you look at something like Jaws, there are a lot of jokes in it, like when the guy says, “we’re gonna need a bigger boat,” those are gags. In this, when Bulstrode (Richard E Grant) says, “there aren’t any monsters - because we do our job so well,” that’s a gag. If you put humour through it, it becomes more real and allows you to pull off a lot more.
