Beyond good and evil: Silk goes to court

The legal drama has become a staple of stage and screen, for a variety of excellent reasons. All of human life really is there, from love and hate to good and evil, crammed into the claustrophobic cockpit of the courtroom. Adding an extra squirt of kerosene to an already explosive mix is the fact that, as Dr Gregory House likes to say, “Everybody lies.”

The latest cab on the telly-lawyer rank is Silk, BBC One’s sizzling new six-parter from Peter Moffat. A former barrister himself, Moffat has carved out a prestigious legally orientated screenwriting career, which has taken him from Kavanagh QC in the mid-Nineties to North Square and Criminal Justice.

“I did North Square about 10 years ago, and felt I hadn’t really finished,” says Moffat, by way of introducing his latest brainchild. “I had a lot of stories. I was at the Bar for eight or nine years and I had a lot of stuff to tell, and I think it’s quite natural drama territory. There’s always a big moment at the end, there’s always the guilty or not-guilty moment, and little interesting structures within that. The cross-examination is a story of its own. I just thought there was a lot to say, and I feel television can really get under its surface.”

Silk homes in on the courtroom performances, private lives and political struggles of the lawyerly folk of  Shoe Lane Chambers, in London’s Middle Temple. At centre stage – and the similarities between acting and playing the barrister in court are not lost on the cast – are Martha Costello (Maxine Peake) and Clive Reader (Rupert Penry-Jones), two battling barristers vying to be appointed QCs (or “take silk”, as the legal fraternity would have it). Both also have some previous with Moffat, since Penry-Jones was one of the leads in North Square and Peake played the abused wife of barrister Joe Miller (Matthew Macfadyen) in the second series of Criminal Justice. Her leading men should watch out - she fatally stabbed Macfadyen, and in Silk an argument with Penry-Jones sends him tumbling down a staircase. “I do it to all the posh actors,” she chortles. (John Thaw in Peter Moffat's Kavanagh QC, pictured below.)

It’s the professional rivalry between Martha and Clive that supplies the central thrust of the action, pepped up by a soupçon of class warfare. As a woman, Costello is already a rarity in a profession which has only appointed 245 female QCs in its entire history. Rarer still, she’s from a working-class background in the North of England (Peake herself was born in Bolton). Reader, meanwhile, is a well-heeled Old Harrovian, oozing obnoxious quantities of self-assurance. “He was always going to be whatever he wanted to be,” observes Penry-Jones. Costello still adheres to the ideals which first brought her into the legal profession – “innocent until proven guilty, four words to live by” as she puts it – while Reader is driven by a powerful urge to win cases and further his own career. Sentimental concern for the underdog is not on his agenda.

It must be said that on first impressions, Clive Reader looks like a bit of a scumbag.

“Yes, absolutely,” Penry-Jones agrees cheerfully. “But I hope that through the series you’ll keep changing your mind about him. It’s not easy to pin him down, because he does a lot of very horrible things, but also I hope he’s quite likeable as well. You never know when he’s doing something nice for its own sake, or whether he’s got an ulterior motive. But the characters within the show like him. His personality grates sometimes, but he’s still one of the gang.” (The cast of North Square, pictured below.)

Penry-Jones is well aware that "there’s been a lot of lawyer shows and it’s difficult to give them a new slant”, but confesses he became a devotee of a recent BBC predecessor, Garrow’s Law: “It was fascinating to see how legal structures we’re dealing with in Silk were being established 300 years ago.” He was attracted by Moffat’s new scripts because of the way they combine the practice of law with the madly pedalling duck’s feet of what’s happening underneath the surface of the judicial action.

“It’s not just about court cases, it’s about the characters within the chambers. Obviously we have to tell the particular story of the week, but it’s about the personalities surrounding that, the clerks and the pupils who are involved with the barristers.”

Although it doesn’t happen in episode one, romance is on the horizon for Reader and his legal “pupil” Niamh Cranitch, played by Natalie Dormer. Cranitch's father is a judge. You may surmise that the career-obsessed Reader’s romantic interest in her camouflages a desire to suck up to the legal hierarchy, but I couldn’t possibly comment. Researching the series, Dormer found herself fascinated by the insulated, somewhat Dickensian nature of the legal profession. (Matthew Macfadyen in Criminal Justice, pictured below.)

“The criminal Bar is a very small community and very inward-looking,” she says. “As actors we think our industry is insular and everybody knows everyone, and this is exactly the same. It’s a little micro-climate, and that makes for good drama. Personal relationships frequently overlap with professional ones. This show comes from a new angle. It’s like Upstairs Downstairs – you’re downstairs, and you see the mechanics of how chambers work.”

A subject Moffat has touched on in his previous series is the influence which clerks wield within the legal trade (for instance, North Square was much preoccupied with the diabolical scheming of chief clerk Peter McLeish, played by Phil Davis), and he takes another swing at it in Silk, where Neil Stuke plays chief clerk Billy Lamb. It has become a truism of legal drama that cases are often dropped on barristers at ludicrously short notice, but, insists Moffat, it happens all the time, and the clerking system is at least partly to blame.

“You might only get the brief the night before the trial, so you’re up all night preparing it," he says. "You may never have met the client before you get to court. That might happen 25 per cent of the time. Some of that’s to do with the clerks, because they want to get as many of their people in work as possible on any given day. They get 10 or 12 per cent of any fees, so it really matters to them that everybody is working all the time, so they take things right to the wire. There’s more chambers politics to come throughout the series.”

"You have to keep the clerks happy," adds Penry-Jones. "If your clerk's off you, you don't get any briefs. Really the clerk's the boss, even though he has to call you 'sir'." (Tom Hughes and Natalie Dormer as legal pupils in Silk, pictured below.)

All of which might persuade many onlookers that the law is not merely an ass, but a three-legged one with its head stuck on back to front. Yet Peter Moffat still sees merit in the system.

"When I was practising, there were great things about the system and there were great barristers, but there were some who were really crap and you wouldn't want them. You wouldn't have wanted me when I was 23, really not. And it can be a really demoralising experience when you're representing somebody like Gary Rush [a recurring character in Silk], who's clearly horrible. Probably 80 per cent of the people you represent, if you had to put your mortgage on it you'd say they were guilty. So it's not easy. But I think the system is a good one, even though I don't think it's the best one."

• Silk begins on BBC One at 9pm on Tuesday, 22 February
• Watch North Square on 4oD
• Find Kavanagh QC on Amazon
• Find Criminal Justice on Amazon