| TV with Impact
Anthony Horowitz’s new drama is an epic five-night journey There’s a “Keep off the grass” sign in the lift that takes you, glamorously, straight into Anthony Horowitz’s apartment in Clerkenwell, central London. It makes no sense until you glance down and realise that the wall to wall turf is artificial turf. Horowitz, whose TV credits include Foyle’s War and Murder in Mind, and who is the author of the phenomenally successful Alex Rider junior spy books, is on a mission to disconcert. Collision, his latest project, co-written with Michael A. Walker, is a mind bending thriller for ITV. Starring Douglas Henshall, Kate Ashfield and Paul McGann and shown over five consecutive nights, its starting point is a motorway pile-up and from there it gradually untwists the interconnected events and personalities leading up to the point of impact. “It’s the old dance of death idea,” explains 55 year-old Horowitz, a bouncy individual who talks faster than most people can think. “The idea that, we’re all of us dancing around each other and we aren’t aware of it until something terrible –like a car crash-brings us together. That was the original inspiration behind Collision”. There’s a kind of billiard-ball determinism to drama, a rapid ricochet action that keeps the characters in constant, almost Dickensian interplay. “I love Dickens,” says Horowitz gesturing to the complete works on the shelves behind him. “I’m a great lover too, of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. Good ness knows, if you called Collision Jacobean drama for the 21st century, you’d probably lose three million viewers. So, let’s not do that. But it does begin there-you know, ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods’ – that kind of thing.” The motorway (in this case a stretch of dual carriageway specially constructed for the production) is, he says, a metaphor for life. “A car journey is always a narrative; it’s a chapter in a story, or a paragraph in a chapter. When you get into the car; you make your choices about the roads you’re following and the expectation is that you will get to the other end. The collision is a nasty reminder of how easily we can be uprooted by fate from the journeys we were planning to make.” So is Horowitz a fatalist at heart? “No, because I have a belief in one’s own destiny and in one’s own ability to control it – up to a point. But sometimes I think that can be quite a tough thing to do. As a writer, I spend my entire life manipulating characters. That’s what I do for a living. I take characters and I murder them or I make them happy. I make them rich or poor. And I’ve been doing that for 30 years. So it’s not surprising that I should wonder who or what is doing the same thing to my life. “These are big philosophical questions, but I have to stress that Collision is an action adventure thriller. It’s an ITV primetime show, and I never forgot it, not for one minute – but these are the things at the back of your mind. And the longer you go on writing and the older you get the more you begin to question the invisible forces in your life. I suppose if there’s a philosophy to my life it’s ‘live for the minute, because you don’t know what the hour is going to bring.’” The author promises that the closing scenes of Collision area a “wow moment” (“if viewers have been watching for five nights, they’re owed that”). However, conclusion, in a traditional sense, is a step too near for Horowitz’s vision. “There is an investigative element and an element of resolution, but it’s not so much a who-or-what-or-why-dunnit. It’s more ‘What do we take away from this? ’ And I don’t think it’s just that we should be more careful when we drive.” E. Jane Dickson Radio Times – November 7th -13th 2009 |