Save Me, Sky Atlantic

”Shark dicks, Nick! It’s all about shark dicks!” That’s what Lennie James said to me when we first met nearly two years ago.

He was explaining why he’d chosen to devote much of the first 10 pages of Save Me to a heated debate in a Rotherhithe pub about whether sharks have one penis or two.

It was clear what he meant: “We start as we mean to go on.”

That scene, that messy, exuberant clatter of dialogue, would not only be the first scene we filmed; it was to become shorthand for what we wanted to bring to the entire show.

So what does ‘shark dicks’ represent? Well, for one, it’s an arresting opening. Across the board, I wanted us to confound expectation in our design, blocking, performances, pace and emotional weight, even the shot selection and music choices.

I didn’t want any of it to feel like a drama you’d seen before. In fact, if anyone who was watching the show paused it at any point, I don’t believe they would be able to predict what was going to happen in the next 10 minutes or even 10 seconds. Of all the things that make me proud of this production, this tops the list.

But that ‘shark dicks’ scene is also about the idiosyncrasy, warmth and wit that we worked so hard to cram into the series. Why are dramas set in and around housing estates always so damn grim?

In real life, I don’t pretend many of them aren’t grim as housing standards go, often scandalously so, but working class communities on television almost always lack the colour and visual diversity they’re packed with.

Setting the tone

In Save Me, we run these scenes alongside, and inside, the most serious of dramatic situations. Why have a background extra walking discreetly by when we could have a man in pyjamas with his shopping, a woman in a burka stealing a sneaky vape underneath her veil, a bruiser on a hover-board, or some elderly Sikhs playing rugby with a plastic bottle?

Whatever the schedule and financial pressure to drop these things, we resisted. And it plays a huge part in the tone of the show.

This process ended up delivering more than we bargained for. As Lennie’s character Nelly makes his way through the estate, I wanted a naked bloke on a high balcony to be howling like a wolf. It’s got nothing to do with the story; it’s just that there’s a guy near me who howls outside his house when he’s bored and I guess I wanted to tip my hat to that.

What we didn’t foresee is the effect this would have on the dogs in the estate. Almost at once, they all erupted into barks and howls themselves, from all over the estate. Lennie just went with it.

Although his character is entering a kind of hell, it still felt right that he would laugh at the lunacy of the situation – a naked wolf-man leading a dozen dogs in a mad chorus. I loved it so much I used them again later in the series at a critical moment in the story, but I can’t honestly claim that was my idea.

Location and design play a massive role in expressing the vibrancy and verisimilitude of the world. I wanted to use real places, with real views out of windows, those real in-your-face murals that nice middle-class areas lack.

Production designer Melanie Allen and her team transformed the abandoned flats we found in Stratford into bold expressions of each character. As with the ‘look at me’ extras, it takes huge bravery to go with many of the choices she made.

I’ve seen a few shows where the desire to lift the mood has produced something so colourful it looks more like a sitcom than real life. That’s ridiculous, but as the portrait work of Scottish photographer Niall McDiarmid shows so beautifully, these aren’t places of an exclusively glum, grey palette.

We went with individual hits of colour and even codified them to certain characters: Nelly is yellow, Teens is pink, Zita is red, Claire is pale blue and so on.

Whenever their characters are discussed or relevant to the scene, a hit of their accent colour features in shot. It’s a game, but one that helps define our world.

Getting this stuff right in a production requires everyone ‘top-to-bottom’ to get the point. And everyone did. Everyone knew what ‘shark dicks’ meant, even if we couldn’t agree on how many they had.