Tony Grisoni

In Red Riding (2009), the difficulty is knowing how to challenge people whose colleagues have every reason to protect them. Tony Grisoni’s writing makes those connections matter, so that challenging one person seems likely to bring others to their defence. We were disturbed by how ordinary the corruption felt, and by the convincing sense that the institutions would close ranks. It is a strongly acted series worth the effort of following its sometimes unnecessarily tangled plot.

His first feature, Queen of Hearts (1989), was directed by Jon Amiel. A long collaboration with Terry Gilliam followed: he co-wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) and worked on Tideland (2005). Difficult literary adaptations became a recurring part of his work. There was another approach in In This World (2002), a docudrama following refugee journeys, whose script drew on research into real journeys. For Red Riding, he adapted three of David Peace’s Yorkshire novels into a television trilogy.

Adapting Peace, Grisoni keeps the sense that an individual crime belongs to a much larger history of damage. He lets relationships suggest the scale of the trouble rather than treating each offence as a separate puzzle to be solved. That gives the crime story weight beyond the immediate business of discovering who did what. The weaker passages introduce recognisable crime-drama types and ask the performances to make them particular. The actors largely manage it, though a clearer plot would not have made the series any less disturbing.

Later television work includes Southcliffe (2013) and a contribution to Paolo Sorrentino’s The Young Pope (2016). The Gilliam collaboration continued with the co-written The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018). We would still point first to Red Riding, where his attention to institutions protecting themselves produces an unsettling, strongly acted programme. Its occasional lack of clarity is a caveat, not a reason to dismiss it. Set aside the telephone; the plot already requires enough attention.