Martina Cole’s The Take is set in the 1980s and is full of booze, frantic sex, fags, Wayfarers, Ford Capris, East End verbals and scary violence.
It’s got a mean cast, the kind of faces who look like they frequent pub lock-ins and don’t like being stared at.
It’s a million miles from twee prime-time dross like Rosemary and Thyme and plodding plod George Gently. Forget Susan Boyle, this is TV with Jimmy Boyle in its blood.
Martina Cole's Million-Selling Crime Novels
Cole’s crime novels, which sell in their millions, are renowned for their storytelling, violence and authenticity (she’s a working class lass and her dialogue is always pin sharp). All these elements feature in this four-part drama, spanning 10 years. It looks and feels a damn sight more convincing than every other UK crime show currently around.
Tom Hardy as Freddie Jackson
Tom Hardy is like a young Ray Winstone in the lead role of Freddie Jackson. Just out of prison in 1984 and planning to ‘shake things up’, Freddie struts around settling scores and antagonising everyone from his father (Nicholas Day) to his pregnant wife, Jackie (Kierston Wareing), to the local mob boss, Siddy (David Schofield).
He’s got that blend of arrogance, charisma and danger that viewers will believe. ‘Who’s this poof?’ he sneers on seeing a picture of Boy George, before going on to shove his former accomplice’s head through a TV.
Brian Cox as Ozzy
It must be said, he’s got form here, Mr Hardy, having recently played a thug in RocknRolla and the crazed UK prisoner Charles Bronson.
Meanwhile, Brian Cox (The Bourne Supremacy, Troy) is Ozzy, the prison-dwelling godfather who is initially irritated by the Freddie’s ructions, but who starts to manipulate the young thug and his less violent cousin, Jimmy (Shaun Evans).
The opening episode sets the scene quickly, with Martina Cole’s trademark family scenes of squealing kids, put-upon WAGs, and fierce loyalties, climaxing in a security depot raid heavily inspired by the Brink’s-Mat robbery (which took place a year before The Take begins).
Double-Crossing and Dangerous Passions
Freddie is ordered by Ozzy to join Siddy on the raid. When the latter reneges on giving Freddie his cut, the younger man offs Siddy. It’s left to clever Jimmy to straighten matters with Ozzy and facilitate his and Freddie’s move up the ranks.
Martina Cole’s women are often either suffering girlfriends or ballsy types who run their own crime syndicates. So The Take has Patricia (Sara Stewart), Ozzy’s sister and representative on the outside who can’t help smirking at Freddie’s brazenness even while delivering a stern warning to him from her brother.
Does her smirk betray something more highly charged than amusement? These being the kind of folk who like to live close to the edge, it seems unlikely they’ll ignore dangerous passions, whatever the cost.
Shaun Evans with a Twist of Michael Corleone
Jealousy and revenge mark Freddie’s violent trajectory as everyone is caught in his wake, particularly Jackie and her sister Maggie (Charlotte Riley, also to be seen soon in ITV’s Wuthering Heights, again with Tom Hardy). It’s a tough, potent drama, and as Freddie continues shaking everything and everyone up, it’s Jimmy who emerges from his shadow as the Michael Corleone figure.
Look up Martina Cole in the Mammoth Encyclopedia of Modern Crime Fiction or Bloomsbury’s 100 Must Read Crime Novels and she’s nowhere to be seen. Bizarre, seeing as she is said to be easily Britain’s best-selling author, translated into 28 languages, who sells 300,000 in hardback (according to her agent, Darley Anderson, in The Observer Magazine 31 5 09).
Award-Winning Novel
The Take was not only 2005’s bestselling UK hardback but it won the Best Crime Thriller at the British Book Awards. So Sky1 has shown some populist nous in dramatising her rich, story-led fiction, giving viewers a deserved break from Dickens and the classics.
Its publicity department quotes her as saying: ‘The Take was my era – I wanted to capture that. Every now and then I like to take people back to another era and show them how something began. Like the drug culture, Es and everything else.'
'My Books Are Anti-Violence'
‘I’m not pro-drugs, don’t get me wrong,' the author told Sky1. 'But I think its left open for gangsters to deal in them because people don’t open youth clubs on estates.
‘I was 50 this year. We all dabbled. Anyone who says they didn’t was lying. But if I didn’t live the life that I’ve lived I wouldn’t be able to write the books that I do.
‘But look, people say my books are violent – but they’re anti-violence. They’re about the ramifications of being violent. Men write violent books but they never write about the after-effects. I write about the women who have to live with it.’
Just when TV’s summer schedules looked like dozing off with repeats and Big Brother, Sky1 should be applauded for shaking things up a bit.
- Martina Cole’s The Take
- Director David Drury
- Writer Neil Biswas
- Producer Willow Grylls
- Sky1, starts Wednesday 17 June 9pm
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