The Singapore Grip is another lavish drama

It’s Sunday evening and it’s ITV. That can mean only one thing – it’s time for a lavish drama.

In recent years we’ve been treated to the likes of Beecham House, The Good Karma Hospital, The Durrells, Mr Selfridge and the grandaddy of them all, Downton Abbey.

The Singapore Grip can now be added to that list, and the broadcaster hopes it can mirror or even surpass its predecessors in the ratings war; the early signs are good – it’s got an all-star cast and has been adapted from a novel by JG Farrell by Oscar-winning scribe Christopher Hampton.

Like so many people previously associated with the big screen, Hampton is more than happy to work for TV – it is, after all, said to be going through a golden period.

“I think it’s one of the benefits that the mini-series has become a more current form than it used to be,” he says. “It’s replaced the single film to a large extent. It’s been hard enough squeezing this into six hours, frankly, so to get it into a film would be very difficult. In fact, when Farrell had his first big success, which was The Siege of Krishnapur, lots of big film-makers tried to make it – David Lean, Stephen Frears – but it’s that thing of squeezing a quart into a pint pot. What this gives you is the possibility and the luxury of telling the whole story and giving the minor characters, who are all very well drawn, their moment in the sun.

“Television is now able to take on much more ambitious projects. I kind of regret in certain ways that the cheap and cheerful BBC of the Seventies has gone where you could write very quickly and see your play on television within a few months. Relationships were being forged between writers of my generation and directors like Stephen Frears, Mike Newell and Michael Apted, who were all in television at that time, but we didn’t have the resources that people command nowadays.”

The Singapore Grip is set during the Second World War and focuses on a British family living in the sovereign state at the time of the Japanese invasion.

David Morrissey stars as Walter Blackett, who runs a successful rubber company with his business partner Webb (Charles Dance), whose health is beginning to fail. In a bid to secure the firm’s future, Blackett decides to pair up his spoilt daughter Joan (Georgia Blizzard) with Webb’s son Matthew (Luke Treadaway), little realising that Webb Jr only has eyes for Vera Chiang (Elizabeth Tan), a mysterious Chinese refugee. Hampton has directed several of his own screenplays for the big screen, but seems he wasn’t tempted to take on The Singapore Grip: “I’ve never directed television before. I think it’s gruelling. I’m impressed with Tom Vaughan and how he knows how to pace every day and how much coverage he is able to get done. I think I would have to lie down for a year if I directed it!”

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