If you remember the Sixties, the old joke goes, then you weren't there. Writer Paula Milne was there and she has harnessed her powers of recollection for an epic new BBC2 drama that not only spans the Sixties, but the Seventies and Eighties as well. White Heat follows a group of students thrown together in a London flat-share in 1965, and it's already been dubbed "Our Friends in the South" – a comparison with Peter Flannery's 1996 series Our Friends in the North that Milne (The Politician's Wife, Small Island) believes is not quite on the mark.
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"I didn't want it to be just a group of London students... I wanted to have this mix, but at the same time why would they be together?" asks Milne. Her solution was to turn this particular house-share into a deliberate social experiment engineered by student landlord Jack (Sam Claflin). A radicalised MP's son whose father bought the house, Jack gets to make up the house rules, including a ban on monogamy, that reflect the free love (or "contingent relationships" – Jack is keen on his Sartre and De Beauvoir) spirit of the time. "I went to art college and there was quite a lot of that," says Milne, "particularly the rule about not sleeping with anyone for more than three consecutive nights. There was a sense of 'let's run this differently'."
The six hour-long episodes are set respectively in 1965, 1967, 1972, 1979, 1982 and 1990, taking in anti-Vietnam War protests, IRA bombs, industrial unrest, the Falklands War, Aids and Thatcher. The mix of the personal and the political is framed by a flash-forward to the present day, in which their old house is being revisited by the former friends after one of their number dies and makes them the executors of his or her will.
The survivors haven't seen each other in 20 years ("something cataclysmic happens in 1990," says Milne), and the identity of the dead character is withheld until the final episode, although from the opening episode it clearly isn't the feminist Charlotte (played in the present day by Juliet Stevenson) or former art student Lilly (Lindsay Duncan), who are the first to arrive. The younger versions of Charlotte and Lilly are played by Claire Foy (Little Dorrit, The Promise) and MyAnna Buring (The Twilight Saga); they're joined by Claflin, Lee Ingleby (Being Human), David Gyasi, Reece Ritchie and Jessica Gunning.
"Getting the right cast was crucial," says Milne. "They must age from 18 to their early 40s and they have to have the maturity to actually get into the mind-set of somebody in their thirties facing childlessness, or whatever. We cover seven time frames... and they all say they are lucky to play such parts. Me, I think we are lucky to have them."
Read More at The Independent
[...]
"I didn't want it to be just a group of London students... I wanted to have this mix, but at the same time why would they be together?" asks Milne. Her solution was to turn this particular house-share into a deliberate social experiment engineered by student landlord Jack (Sam Claflin). A radicalised MP's son whose father bought the house, Jack gets to make up the house rules, including a ban on monogamy, that reflect the free love (or "contingent relationships" – Jack is keen on his Sartre and De Beauvoir) spirit of the time. "I went to art college and there was quite a lot of that," says Milne, "particularly the rule about not sleeping with anyone for more than three consecutive nights. There was a sense of 'let's run this differently'."
The six hour-long episodes are set respectively in 1965, 1967, 1972, 1979, 1982 and 1990, taking in anti-Vietnam War protests, IRA bombs, industrial unrest, the Falklands War, Aids and Thatcher. The mix of the personal and the political is framed by a flash-forward to the present day, in which their old house is being revisited by the former friends after one of their number dies and makes them the executors of his or her will.
The survivors haven't seen each other in 20 years ("something cataclysmic happens in 1990," says Milne), and the identity of the dead character is withheld until the final episode, although from the opening episode it clearly isn't the feminist Charlotte (played in the present day by Juliet Stevenson) or former art student Lilly (Lindsay Duncan), who are the first to arrive. The younger versions of Charlotte and Lilly are played by Claire Foy (Little Dorrit, The Promise) and MyAnna Buring (The Twilight Saga); they're joined by Claflin, Lee Ingleby (Being Human), David Gyasi, Reece Ritchie and Jessica Gunning.
"Getting the right cast was crucial," says Milne. "They must age from 18 to their early 40s and they have to have the maturity to actually get into the mind-set of somebody in their thirties facing childlessness, or whatever. We cover seven time frames... and they all say they are lucky to play such parts. Me, I think we are lucky to have them."
Read More at The Independent
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