Last heard of heading for the States after being forced to leave Edinburgh with some haste, Leith’s finest, James McLevy, is back on the airwaves after six years.
The fictional character, played by Succession star Brian Cox and based on Edinburgh’s first real-life detective, returns to Radio 4 where his tough-talk and crack sleuthing have won an enduring army of fans over 23 years.
Jean Brash, his romantic sparring partner in a long-running will they/won’t they storyline, is just as popular and actress Siobhan Redmond is delighted to be back playing the feisty madame, formerly owner of The Just Land, Edinburgh’s “best bawdie-hoose”.
She said: “Obviously a great deal of its popularity has to do with how Brian absolutely embodies the role of McLevy.
“Every time we come to do it, despite his international, probably intergalactic success, he’ll always say towards the end of the recording, ‘I always forget this is my favourite job’.
“It has to be, because he doesn’t have to be doing radio drama, but he wants to do it. And that’s a testament to all sorts of things really, but I think mainly to how McLevy has captured his imagination as well as everybody else’s.”
Cox may now be enjoying worldwide superstardom after playing belligerent media mogul Logan Roy in Succession, yet the atmosphere when returning to the Radio 4 studio remains as it always has, according to Redmond.
“There’s quite a cheeky atmosphere on McLevy,” she said, highlighting the long working relationship between her, Cox, writer David Ashton and director Bruce Young.
“We all just get on and really love working together. The thing is that we don’t see each other that often so familiarity doesn’t really have a chance to breed contempt. It’s always good. It’s always fun and it wouldn’t be if the scripts weren’t wonderful.”
These new episodes see McLevy and Brash venture to San Francisco during the gold rush having fled Edinburgh after his career ended in a little difficulty at the end of the last series in 2016.
It’s a departure for the characters and Redmond is keen to see if audiences – as well as BBC bosses – will embrace the change of setting from the Victorian streets of Edinburgh, which is as much a character in McLevy as the wily detective or her outspoken madame.
“It will be fascinating to see whether or not listeners want more of it, and whether or not the high heid yins at the BBC want more of it,” she said.
“It will be interesting to see how it goes, and of course we have a great advantage in that Succession is so well, successful.
“And Brian is so fantastic in it, but I think perhaps it might even bring a new international audience to the back catalogue of McLevy.”
Succession fans will, she says, get a chance to familiarise and fall in love with the city of Edinburgh if they do, according to Redmond. Although she lives in London now, she once stayed in Edinburgh and despite being a Glaswegian, it’s a city she adores.
“My family is much reduced, because I’m 62 years old, you know, there’s not that many of us,” she added. “Edinburgh gave me a kind of a base to work from when I happened to be employed in Scotland. I don’t live there anymore, but I miss it enormously. I feared because I really loved Edinburgh that living there might diminish its beauty, and absolutely it didn’t.
“I still get the same thrill when I get off the train. I live in North London near to Kings Cross, and I always travel to Edinburgh by train.
“And the thrill of that stretch of the rail track between Newcastle and Edinburgh never leaves me, nor the excitement when I get off the train and walk up Princes Street. It’s just so beautiful. There’s a tendency to romanticise it, isn’t there? There’s that haar and the fact it can be so bright and so cold at the same time. It’s so compelling. It still holds a romantic fascination for me.”
The character of Jean Brash has sparred with McLevy – inspired by the real-life detective who solved more than 2,200 cases in the capital – giving as good as she got over the years and, in a modern world where strong female fictional characters are more prominent than ever, the chance to play a capable woman retains its thrill for Redmond.
“She’s very, very unlike me. She’s got a very cool head and she’s not fazed by anybody. She’s a poker player and I can’t play cards at all, because I can’t count and you can read whatever I’m thinking on my face.
“So there’s a kind of opposites attract thing about her, but I like the fact she’s got a temper, she’s not infallible, and I enjoy how funny she is. She’s a witty woman.”
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