Author and filmmaker Adam Scovell—whose second novel How Pale the Winter Has Made Us was published earlier this year to great acclaim—sent me this wonderful trailer that asks “What if there was a gritty 70s UK TV series based on the black novels of the notorious crime author Derek Raymond?”
Adam writes:
“For some time now, I’ve daydreamed about adapting for the screen Derek Raymond’s Factory series of novels, following the unnamed sergeant at A14 or the Met’s Department of Unexplained Deaths. Raymond’s work was adapted twice in film, both in the 1980s by French directors. For a quintessentially London writer, his work didn’t quite translate to Paris no matter the qualities of those films. Equally, even if a modern adaptation was possible, it would still have to contend with the vast shifts taken place in London itself since the novels were written. The shabby, industrial vision of the capital, so essential to Raymond’s work, would be difficult to recreate authentically. Instead, I wanted to imagine a “what-if” vision of Raymond’s brutal but beautiful Factory novels, looking to British Television produced a decade before he wrote the first in his series, He Died With His Eyes Open. Finding a range of material in a number of London Weekend Television and Thames Television dramas, it was clear that there was enough to make a trailer. In my daydream, I cast Tom Bell as the intrepid sergeant, and found a wealth of villains, from Brian Glover to William Marlowe. Archive television of the 1970s is replete with work that deals with the themes that Raymond would pursue and push into the realm of the transgressive, so I see a natural fit between programmes and dramas made in this era and the relentless novels he would produce in the following decade.”
