Murder, mushrooms and Sherlock: Irish storyteller Brendan Foley on a fascinating wild mix
Amelia Rojas (Blu Hunt) and Sherlock (David Thewlis). Credit: Starlings Entertainment Arthur Conan Doyle's witheringly insistent detective Sherlock Holmes has worn many faces since he first appeared in the author's 1887 novel A Study in Scarlet . The 221B Baker Street-based sleuth was first depicted on screen by an unknown actor in Arthur Marvin's 30-second silent film Sherlock Holmes Baffled at the turn of the 20 th century. Danish actor Viggo Larsen stepped into the role a few years later for the Nordisk Film Company. Since then, we've had everyone from Peter Cushing to Michael Caine, Ian McKellen to Benedict Cumberbatch. Big, no-doubt luxurious leather, shoes to fill, then. Belfast-born journalist-turned screen storyteller was well aware of the weight on his shoulders when creating magnificently fun show, . 'Sherlock's had the most outings in television history, and that's a double-edged sword,' Foley says. How do you bring a fresh perspective to such an enduring story? By upending everything Sherlock thinks he knows. Dr Watson and their landlady, Mrs Hudson, are missing, and Holmes is no longer at the top of his game. 'I thought, 'Wouldn't it be more interesting to meet him as a lion in winter?'' Foley says. 'That's pretty hard for poor old Sherlock, who has been lauded and has a bit of a Napoleon complex.'
Depicted by the inimitable David Thewlis, Sherlock's also confronted with the daughter he never knew he had in kick-ass Amelia Rojas, a revelatory turn from Blu Hunt. 'Hats off to Blu,' Foley says. 'It's not easy to act opposite a world-class character actor like David, but she more than holds her own.' 'Sherlock is a massive experimenter,' Foley says. 'He's got that encyclopaedic, scientific inquiring mind and infamously experiments with substances. So, what if he possibly, just once, experimented with what is his rather dysfunctional version of love?' Of course, Sherlock refuses to believe Amelia, denying a dalliance with her murdered mother, Lucia (Savonna Spracklin), a First Nations woman with an inventor's curiosity. Amelia's pretty pissed he won't take her word for it, particularly as she had to beg, borrow and steal to cross the Pacific, find Sherlock and gain his help uncovering her killer.
'If Amelia does turn out to be a blood relative of Sherlock, then the one thing you know is that half of her is Holmes' stuffy Anglo-Saxon, while her mother has this fascinating First Nations and Californian-Spanish background,' Foley says. Amelia may be a fish out of water, but she's sharp as a tack and handy with a gun and hand-to-hand combat. Foley pits them against a crime gang with an insidiously global reach, symbolically picking at a thread from A Study in Scarlet by leaving a strand of scarlet string at every crime scene. Sherlock also consults the imprisoned Professor Moriarty, his twisted frenemy depicted by a delightfully devious Dougray Scott. 'Sherlock and Moriarty are classic 19 th -century big beasts, but they're both at the end of that cycle,' Foley says. 'After the First World War, industrialised conflict is creeping towards them and there are these explosions of technology, like the telephone, changing the way things have been done for a very long time.' Can they keep up, with help from Amelia? And just who is the handsome Australian stranger freshly arrived in London, having been transported as a light-fingered kid? Invisible Boys star Joe Klocek depicts him with gung-ho gusto. 'The late-Victorian era wouldn't have been the classic transportation period, but it was definitely happening to anyone British society wanted rid of, right up until shamefully recently,' Foley says.
With a scintillating mystery, villainous skulduggery and action aplenty, Sherlock & Daughter is stupendous fun with broad appeal. 'There are two quite different audiences,' Foley says. 'One is the classic Sherlock Holmes audience, and the other is much younger and interested in possible romance. Ultimately, what would the relationship be like between someone like Holmes and Amelia, who just crash-lands into his world?'
With the source novel by Antti Tuomainen covered, how do you continue the story of mushroom entrepreneur Jaakko (Jussi Vatanen, ), who was slowly, inescapably dying after being deliberately poisoned by fatal fungi in season one? Foley and co-writer Markku Flink take a wild and wonderful swing. 'Season one was essentially 'How do you choose to spend your time when you've been sleepwalking your way through life?'' Foley says. 'Season two is about if you should find yourself unexpectedly still alive, what would you do to stay alive?'
Foley relished the chance to expand the show. 'Antti has that really specific weirdness of, say, the Coen brothers, which was my guiding star on season one,' he says. 'Working together with the same characters for season two but without that brilliant superstructure was all about taking totally left-field ideas that were a joy to write.' Especially Jaakko. 'He's got a sort of slightly Dilbert corporate sensibility and takes his mushrooms very seriously,' Foley says. 'But he's also a really decent human being in a world several sizes too big for him, trying to make sense of it, and I think that's why audiences root for him.'
Viewers also root for Lia (Sofia Pekkari), a Finnish woman drawn into a clandestine group, led by Pihla Viitala's Mira, battling the rise of a far-right politician (John Simm) in . Foley contributed writing to the London-set, Nordic-flavoured crime thriller.
How does a Belfast boy wind up being a go-to writer on Nordic noir shows? 'I had a few friends who were Nordic producers back in the day, just at the stage that they were starting to be very outward looking,' Foley says. 'They had a reputation for being cold and unremittingly gloomy, and, in a way, that's what people liked. But they were also looking for quirky differences. So I became the guy who did Nordic noir, who was Irish for some inexplicable reason.' Much like the participants of , Foley's unusual story has deeply unexpected roots. 'I was fortunate enough to have a very deep DNA dive, and in the year 925, virtually all of my ancestors were Icelandic Viking Celts, so there you go.' Foley's background in internationally-focused business journalism helped hone his interest in other cultures. So he's stoked SBS picked up Sherlock & Daughter . 'There's so much fantastic TV on SBS that you'd never have had the chance to see before,' Foley says. 'It's that mixture of a global view, but always with interesting specifics.' Sherlock & Daughter is airing Thursdays on SBS. New episodes also arrive each Thursday at SBS On Demand.
The Man Who Died season one is streaming at SBS On Demand. Season 2 arrives Thursday 22 May.
Cold Courage is streaming at SBS On Demand.
Share this with family and friends
SBS's award winning companion podcast. Join host Yumi Stynes for Seen, a new SBS podcast about cultural creatives who have risen to excellence despite a role-model vacuum.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Australian
39 minutes ago
- The Australian
Oasis: from clash to cash
Fifteen years after their explosive split, British music legends Liam and Noel Gallagher are reuniting for an Oasis tour that promises not only Britpop nostalgia but also staggering revenues. While Liam has insisted that money is "way down the list" of reasons for the feuding brothers' reunion, British press reports have suggested that each sibling could pocket around £50 million ($67 million). Matt Grimes, a music industry expert at Birmingham City University, offered a slightly more conservative estimate of around £40 million per Gallagher for the 17 UK dates alone. Oasis, whose hits include "Wonderwall", "Don't Look Back in Anger" and "Champagne Supernova", kick off the reunion tour on July 4 in Cardiff before playing several dates in their home city of Manchester the following week. Almost 1.4 million tickets have been sold for the UK shows, generating an estimated £240 million, according to Barclays bank. And that's just the beginning. Merchandise sales, from T-shirts and puzzles to baby clothes and tableware, plus six pop-up shops across the UK and Ireland could push total revenue to around £400 million, Grimes said. The 24 concerts outside the UK, including in Buenos Aires, Chicago, Sydney, Tokyo and Toronto, will drive revenues even higher. - Comeback tour- Still, the money from the return of Oasis is dwarfed by Taylor Swift's record-breaking Eras Tour, which grossed $2.2 billion from ticket sales alone across 149 shows worldwide. It was "a much bigger logistical event or sets of events than Oasis are proposing", Grimes said. There was a chaotic scramble for prized Oasis tickets when they went on sale in August last year. But fans were left outraged by exorbitant ticket costs that saw sudden price hikes -- known as dynamic pricing -- based on overwhelming demand, in some cases from £150 to £350. Ticketmaster, one of the official sales websites, said the pricing decision was made by the "tour organiser". Oasis pointed the finger at their promoter. The Gallagher brothers' promotional plan, however, was minimal: two posts on social media -- one to tease, the other to confirm. "The fact that they announced a reunion after many, many years of 'will they, won't they' is enough to make the press interested," Chris Anderton, professor of cultural economics at the University of Southampton, told AFP. - £1 bn economic boost - For Oasis there's no new album to promote, just classics to revive. "In the 1970s, even maybe the 1980s, you went on tour to sell albums," Anderton said. "Now you go on tour to make money and the album is something on the side -- if you make one at all." "Definitely Maybe", released 30 years ago, climbed back to the top of UK sales charts on the back of the reunion tour announcement. Each Oasis concertgoer will spend an average of £766 on tickets and outgoings such as transport and accommodation, according to Barclays. That is set to inject £1 billion into the British economy. Two key shifts help explain the rise of mega-tours, said Cecile Rap-Veber, managing director at the French artists' rights group Sacem. On one hand, streaming "doesn't bring in as much money as the CD era", prompting artists to look at how to make money elsewhere, she said. On the other, "the public's appetite for live shows" surged after the lockdown years of the Covid-19 pandemic. Those factors make fans more willing to spend big. Grimes sums up the choice: "Do I go to... Spain or maybe the south of France for a week's holiday that's going to cost me £600? Or do I go and see my favourite band?" zap/ajb/jkb/js/pst
News.com.au
42 minutes ago
- News.com.au
Oasis: from clash to cash
Fifteen years after their explosive split, British music legends Liam and Noel Gallagher are reuniting for an Oasis tour that promises not only Britpop nostalgia but also staggering revenues. While Liam has insisted that money is "way down the list" of reasons for the feuding brothers' reunion, British press reports have suggested that each sibling could pocket around £50 million ($67 million). Matt Grimes, a music industry expert at Birmingham City University, offered a slightly more conservative estimate of around £40 million per Gallagher for the 17 UK dates alone. Oasis, whose hits include "Wonderwall", "Don't Look Back in Anger" and "Champagne Supernova", kick off the reunion tour on July 4 in Cardiff before playing several dates in their home city of Manchester the following week. Almost 1.4 million tickets have been sold for the UK shows, generating an estimated £240 million, according to Barclays bank. And that's just the beginning. Merchandise sales, from T-shirts and puzzles to baby clothes and tableware, plus six pop-up shops across the UK and Ireland could push total revenue to around £400 million, Grimes said. The 24 concerts outside the UK, including in Buenos Aires, Chicago, Sydney, Tokyo and Toronto, will drive revenues even higher. - Comeback tour- Still, the money from the return of Oasis is dwarfed by Taylor Swift's record-breaking Eras Tour, which grossed $2.2 billion from ticket sales alone across 149 shows worldwide. It was "a much bigger logistical event or sets of events than Oasis are proposing", Grimes said. There was a chaotic scramble for prized Oasis tickets when they went on sale in August last year. But fans were left outraged by exorbitant ticket costs that saw sudden price hikes -- known as dynamic pricing -- based on overwhelming demand, in some cases from £150 to £350. Ticketmaster, one of the official sales websites, said the pricing decision was made by the "tour organiser". Oasis pointed the finger at their promoter. The Gallagher brothers' promotional plan, however, was minimal: two posts on social media -- one to tease, the other to confirm. "The fact that they announced a reunion after many, many years of 'will they, won't they' is enough to make the press interested," Chris Anderton, professor of cultural economics at the University of Southampton, told AFP. - £1 bn economic boost - For Oasis there's no new album to promote, just classics to revive. "In the 1970s, even maybe the 1980s, you went on tour to sell albums," Anderton said. "Now you go on tour to make money and the album is something on the side -- if you make one at all." "Definitely Maybe", released 30 years ago, climbed back to the top of UK sales charts on the back of the reunion tour announcement. Each Oasis concertgoer will spend an average of £766 on tickets and outgoings such as transport and accommodation, according to Barclays. That is set to inject £1 billion into the British economy. Two key shifts help explain the rise of mega-tours, said Cecile Rap-Veber, managing director at the French artists' rights group Sacem. On one hand, streaming "doesn't bring in as much money as the CD era", prompting artists to look at how to make money elsewhere, she said. On the other, "the public's appetite for live shows" surged after the lockdown years of the Covid-19 pandemic. Those factors make fans more willing to spend big. zap/ajb/jkb/js/pst
News.com.au
5 hours ago
- News.com.au
Singer Tom Parker's devastated widow announces tragic death of new baby
The Wanted singer Tom Parker's widow Kelsey has revealed the tragic death of her baby who was 'born sleeping'. Phoenix Parker-Lindsay died just one week before his due date, it was announced today. Kelsey shared the devastating news by posting a poem to fans, 'For Phoenix. Born sleeping, forever loved.' The phoenix bird symbolises immortality, resurrection and life after death. Kelsey – who announced in January she was expecting her first baby with boyfriend Will Lindsay – wrote on Instagram: 'Before I receive an influx of lovely messages and heartfelt well wishes, I want to just say that I truly appreciate everything you are all going to say and share. 'But with the news being so raw, I would really like to ensure that we as a family are given space and time to process this devastating and earth-shattering news. 'I love you all and thank you for your understanding and space.' Kelsey lost her childhood sweetheart husband Tom in 2022 aged 33 following a brain tumour diagnosis. She shares two children, five-year-old Aurelia and Bodhi, four, with The Wanted star, who scored an Aussie hit in 2011 with his group's signature song, Glad You Came. The family have remained dedicated to raising funds for brain tumour research in Tom's honour with an annual charity football match in his memory. Kelsey went public with her new relationship in September last year, saying she knew her late husband would 'send the right man for her.' The 34-year-old excitedly revealed her pregnancy in January before earlier this month, being pictured ring shopping with her tree surgeon boyfriend, 27. Kelsey previously told how 'close' her kids are to Will – and that they have been excitedly preparing for the new baby to arrive. In an interview with OK! Magazine in March, Kelsey described her pregnancy so far and revealed her due date to be June 30. 'It's been smooth so far', said Kelsey. 'I'm due at the end of June. I'm trying to enjoy this pregnancy more, because I think when you've been through something like I've been through, you realise how precious life is.' 'I know that sounds clichéd, but it's true. I just want to enjoy every moment of it with Will. 'When I fell pregnant with Aurelia, I thought I had my life set. I had the perfect life – I'd been with Tom since the age of 19 and had everything sorted. 'Then my world got flipped upside down and I think that teaches you how precious life is.'
