A community hall in north-east England has been hired for the afternoon to film a scene for one of the standout TV dramas of this year. However, it is off screen – in the cramped kitchen of the building near Hartlepool – that I am seeing one of the most extraordinary and moving tableaux that can have happened on a TV shoot.
Standing before a monitor, Ann Ming, a retired surgical nurse, calmly observes Sheridan Smith pretending to be her with the uncanny accuracy of appearance and speech that is the actor’s speciality. The shot cuts to a young woman. At this point, the production team tenses: this character is Julie Hogg, Ming’s daughter, who was murdered, aged 22, in 1989. How might someone in their 70s deal with seeing a double of herself and her lost child?
“She looks like her,” says the bereaved mother, matter-of-factly. Such grace in bizarre circumstances will not surprise anyone who watches the ITV four-parter I Fought the Law. It shows Ming dealing first with what police believe to be Julie’s disappearance; then, after 80 days, the discovery of her body in the bathroom of a house forensic cops claimed to have carefully searched for five days. This led to the trial for murder of Billy Dunlop, who was acquitted when two juries could not reach verdicts. When the killer later confessed, he could not be tried again under the 800-year-old “double jeopardy” rule against being tried twice for the same crime. The main focus of the series is Ming’s campaign to overturn that rule. She did so in 2006 – after 17 years.
“I didn’t slag off police or judges or the government,” says Ming from an on-set trailer labelled “Real Ann”. “I just took it step by step, writing letters. I slept badly because of flashbacks and nightmares and so on. So my husband Charlie would find me in the middle of the night writing to another politician. I thought: ‘I’ve got the biggest mouth. I’m going to carry on.’”
Did Ming find that the state relied on her eventually giving up? Much like another case of individuals fighting officialdom that was dramatised by ITV in Mr Bates vs the Post Office? “Yes.” So was it stubbornness that kept her going? “No. I think it’s the injustice of it. When I look back, in the 70s, my mam had an argument with the council over her house and I wrote a letter to the secretary of state! And got a reply. So it must always have been in there somewhere. That was my first project.”
Her latest is to prevent “him”, Dunlop – like many relatives of murder victims, she refuses to speak the killer’s name – being released on parole or transferred to an open prison: “I know he’ll probably get out eventually and then I’ll have to deal with that. Hopefully it won’t be in my lifetime.”
The series is adapted from Ming’s book, For the Love of Julie: “People said for years: ‘Why don’t you write a book?’ and I’d say: ‘It hasn’t got an ending.’ Once he was convicted, I was able to write it and it was cathartic. A ghost writer did the book for me [based on interviews] and I remember getting to the end of the transcript and thinking: ‘Wow, you got through all that and came out the other end.’”
The “Real Ann” has a trailer because she is not only the subject of the story but, today, an actor. The scene at the community hall features a line-dancing class, Ming’s distracting pastime, and she cameos as one of the dancers: “I never did it before Julie. And then a friend of mine said: ‘Come on, you need to get out,’ so I started it. When Charlie got Parkinson’s, I couldn’t go for six years. For me it’s two and a half hours when you can’t concentrate on anything except the steps. So I now go five times a week. I wish Julie could have gone because she loved dancing.”
During pre-production, she met Smith several times. Real people who have been portrayed on screen have told me they felt the actor studying them to steal gestures and inflections. Did Ming feel Smith doing that? “No! Was she doing that? I gelled to her straight away. I’d seen everything she’d done except for one, which they gave me. That was where Alison Steadman was her mother and she had to care for her after she’d had a stroke [Care, BBC One, 2018]. I had to do that for my husband and watching her was like watching me!”
An audience enthralled by Ann’s agony at not being able to bring her daughter’s killer to justice despite his admission of guilt may wonder why the rule was held sacrosanct for eight centuries. “It’s a good question,” says screenwriter Jamie Crichton. “I spent a lot of time trying to find the most concise explanation of why ‘double jeopardy’ was a good idea. The best anyone offered was that it encouraged police to build the best case possible. If they thought they could keep coming back, they might be sloppy. They still have it in America, Australia, Canada and many other countries.”
Having changed the law in the UK, Ming is looking beyond: “This programme – what I’d love is to send a copy to Donald Trump and say: ‘Please be brave – change the double jeopardy law all over America. Why are they frightened? People say it would mean everyone getting a retrial. But there are so many safeguards in the English law. It has to be ‘new and compelling’ evidence. When I was campaigning, someone at the Law Commission said it would only ever apply once in a blue moon. I said: ‘What if that blue moon was your son or your daughter?’”
Usually, actors give interviews on set visits when they are not needed for shooting. Smith can’t today as she is in almost every scene. So it is almost a year later that I speak to the actor at the launch of the series. She apologises for “only being able to say hello” during filming but she has no need to be sorry: not only was there the volume of scenes, but almost every moment in the four hours is emotionally fraught. The director, Erik Richter Strand, told her he was amazed by how easily she seemed to find the necessary emotion. Is it simple?
“Erik thinks it was,” says Smith. “Because he would say: ‘Now cry!’, ‘Now scream!’ And he got so used to me crying so much that I think he thought it was like a tap. But actually there’s a struggle underneath to get it.” At drama school, aren’t actors taught to be “in the moment”? “Yeah. But I didn’t go to drama school. So I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m blagging it. Really I just try to recreate the trauma the character would have gone through. I could never say: ‘Give me a tear stick and I’ll pretend to cry.’ I have to feel it.”
Ming is the latest of several real-life people Smith has played, following Cilla Black in Cilla; Charmian Biggs (wife of Great Train Robber Ronnie) in Mrs Biggs; Sarah Sak, mother of a murder victim in Four Lives; Julie Bushby, searching for missing schoolgirl Shannon Matthews in The Moorside; and cancer patient Lisa Lynch in The C Word. Are these biographical roles policy or just what she is offered?
“Not just professional offers. Lisa Lynch contacted me on Twitter and asked me to play her. I wasn’t conscious of it happening. But I think the time I can really act is when it’s someone’s pain. Whether it’s my pain coming out through the acting I don’t know. But I find doing the make-believe stuff much harder. With Mrs Biggs, I’d remember the night my brother died and my mum screaming so I’d tap into that. Now, as a mum, I imagine what if something happened to your child. So I was relieved to finish the job and get home to my son. But also aware that Ann doesn’t get to go home to her daughter. So the least I could do was go through those nine weeks’ torture. Although I don’t want to sound like a wanky actor. It is just acting, but at the same time I find playing a real person gives me purpose. I love doing comedy and make-believe but there’s something about playing a real person’s story.”
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She deeply feels the responsibility of telling real stories: “There was a really emotionally charged scene where Ann tells her grandson that she has lied to him about how his mum died. And I didn’t realise Ann was watching – I don’t think I could have done it if I had known – until she walked on set and said: ‘It was like you’re in my body.’ And we were both bawling our eyes out. That was the reassurance I needed.”
Their relationship, though, was not a complete love-in: “That day you were on set, she saw me smoking and said: ‘Get that cigarette out of your hand,’ and she told me I had too many tattoos.”
I have been watching Smith’s work and interviewing her about it for two decades now and have often been alarmed by what these extraordinary emotional performances seem to take out of her. Is there a cost? “Yeah, there is. I think in the past I’ve used acting as therapy. I’m comfortable with this because I know you. But at the photocall today I was shaking. Ann couldn’t believe it. But, having moved up north with my little boy, suddenly coming back to London and having photographers shouting ‘This way, this way’, it’s overwhelming.
“Obviously I used to drink and find my way through it that way – but now that I’ve found therapy, got my little boy, I’m sober, doing yoga and meditation, I’m a totally different person. I Fought the Law took it out of me and I’ll be mindful of what jobs I take in the future because I’m in the best place I’ve been. I have to always remember that the real-life characters have actually gone through this but I think a little bit of each character stays in me.”
Last year, in the play Opening Night in London’s West End, she seemed, perhaps riskily, to be putting herself into the character of an actor struggling through a production while drunk, as had seemed to be the case with Smith in the musical Funny Girl in 2015. Watching a scene in which Smith’s Opening Night character crawls around outside the theatre, I wonder if it was sensible to be doing this to herself?
“I know! People offer these jobs and I’m still like the little girl from up north who thinks she’ll never work again.” But you were playing a version of? “Myself! I’ve never been that drunk on stage but, when she’s crawling across the pavement to the theatre, it definitely reflected Funny Girl and having the curtain brought down on me and all that. Doing the part was a way of facing my fears and coming to terms with it. I felt that if I could do that, I could do anything.”
Even so, playing Ming has been “the hardest job I have done” and she plans to be more wary of roles that are an empathy decathlon: “I was always going back and forth between drinking and sobriety. But this time I feel it’s for real. I am, though, going to choose my parts very carefully. Sobriety and my son come first, so anything that might knock me off kilter I would be careful of. I go home and look into my little boy’s face and hope that one day he’ll be proud I did these things. With I Fought the Law, he just said: ‘Yukky wig.’ That was his review. Minus five stars. He just kept looking at the photo and laughing.”
Smith has just completed The Cage, a lighter and wholly fictional BBC robbery drama but admits she is “ready to do comedy”. In an era of many TV remakes and reboots, some will wonder about the sitcom Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps, in which she appeared with Ralf Little, Natalie Casey, Will Mellor and Kathryn Drysdale in the first decade of this century.
“I’d love to do that,” says Smith. “Especially after seeing Gavin & Stacey, where they all came back together. I think Two Pints was like our uni for people who didn’t do uni. It would be a reunion with all your pals. I’d do it again in a heartbeat if everyone wanted to.”
I Fought the Law is on ITV1 and ITVX on 31 August.