The Ghost Squad

Lucy Beaumont, reviewer
May 24, 2007
Looks like things are going to get dirty for a new girl detective.

Sometimes it seems like the entire British constabulary is divided into two groups: dirty cops and undercover cops. If represented Venn diagram-style, there would be a bit of overlap between the two categories and it would be in that swampy cesspool that you'd find a bunch of TV drama writers with clipboards.

Tonight the ABC presents a deep-cover double-deal with this new offering partnering Murphy's Law. (By the by, has Aunty bought a job lot of British productions that were cancelled after one season, namely this and The Robinsons? Hardly seems worth investing your time in characters who will only be around for eight hours.)

This first episode provides the back story for central character Amy Harris (Elaine Cassidy). We meet her looking cute - actually very cute with glossy, bouncy hair - and clever, getting through an average day and the arrest of a small-time local crook.

But she returns to the interview room and finds the young man beaten to death. As curious faces turn in her direction, it looks like she's in for it. Out of nowhere the grumpy old men of the Independent Police Complaints Commission arrive and put the cop shop in lockdown. No one is allowed in or out and everyone is being watched.

Yet our Amy is allowed a luxurious slow-mo shower in the well-appointed staff changing room. She emerges fresh but finds her blood-soaked and forensically useful uniform missing. Pretty soon it becomes clear she is being set up by her fellow officers and that it's up to her to clear her name.

Damn it, it's impossible not to mention Nancy Drew here. That girl had her 99 steps. This pixie-faced babe has somewhere around 99 scenes in corridors, elevators, stairwells and loos, all captured on jumpy camera. Despite that, the suspense is fairly well generated.

Who can the idealist trust? The complaints investigators, her handsome boss, her best girlfriend, her dodgy colleagues, the mysterious Pete (Jonas Armstrong)? Obviously (otherwise we'd be left with no series) she reveals the true villains, and is asked to join a shadowy undercover operation, The Ghost Squad, thought to have been abandoned long ago. Looks like things are going to get a lot dirtier for this girl detective.

Nobin Robin - Daily Mirror

Today's Mirror has a small piece on Losing Gemma, with four pics of Jonas involving himself in naughties.  

The article is entitled Nobin Hood  

Robin Hood seems to be all a-quiver - and that sure ain't Maid Marian he's got in his clutches.

Actor Jonas Armstrong is, in fact, enjoying a steamy clinch with co-star Alice Eve in the new ITV1 drama Losing Gemma.

In the show Jonas plays Steve, the ex-fiance of rather annoying Gemma, the travelling partner of Alice's character Esther.

They all get caught up in a huge murder mystery while exploring India.  But despite the strange goings on, Steve and Esther still find time to jump into bed together - then regret it.

Catch Robin enjoying life as a very merry man indeed on December 18.

 Ghost Squad Review November 2005

The Ghost Squad, Channel 4/E4, Tuesday 15 November 2005

What to say if you liked it
A dark, profound drama which burrows to the rotten (fictionalised) heart of the British police force and tears it out with the relish of a thirsty vampire.
What to say if you didn’t like it
The dramatic equivalent of Last of the Summer Wine, in which each week the same plot is slightly tweaked to deceive the audience but always ends with a denouement similar to Compo rolling down a hill in a tin bath with wheels.


What was good about it?

• Both episodes featured fantastic casts. Elaine Cassidy is very good as Amy Harris, an inexperienced police officer who is framed for a death of a minor drugs pusher in custody by her colleagues. Forced to clear her name, she discovers even her best friend in the station was involved but nevertheless hands the vital evidence over to the Police Complaints Authority officers.

• Lloyd Owen as the brash Brice and Christine Tremarco as the fragile, easily led Jo were also stars in part one. But, alas, their part in the series is over after both were implicated directly in the death of the pusher.
 Jonas Armstrong, who played Pete, is a big star in the making.

• The dramatic device of entrapping all the protagonists in the police station, after the PCA ordered a “lockdown”, worked as the action became ever more claustrophobic as Amy learned just who had deceived her and why.

• It’s a drama on Channel 4, which is always embraced with the adoration of a grandmother seeing her grandchildren for the first time in over a year. But hopefully, this one will be given time to grow and flourish and not be butchered soon after its birth like Buried.

• The scene when the whole police station seemed to turn against Amy was reminiscent of Invasion of the Body Snatchers as they crowded her and vilified her for being separate from their cosseted clique.


What was bad about it?

• Amy’s introductory scene where the charming drugs pusher she’s just arrested listed all of her athletic qualities, which in turn revealed her attitudes towards such things as testosterone-driven competition. It was too economical and seemed staged with the artifice of a Marvel comic when the villain expounds: “Curse you, Jaguarman. With your infallible camouflage and furtive nature you surprised me and pinned me to the floor with your super-sharp claws.”

• The 118 118 ad break cameos. But if we urgently needed to get a phone number, guess which number we’d call?

• When Amy was under pressure from the PCA officers after they had identified her as the prime suspect and she then falsely accused them of sexual harassment she was thrown in a room by herself and the door was locked. But she didn’t then protest about the false imprisonment.

• The plotting was unconvincing at the crucial point of the first episode when Amy blithely coerced Jo, a wily copper who took part in interrogations, into revealing the location of the murdered pusher’s mobile phone.

 

Why Gemma's a jewel

10:42am Wednesday 13th December 2006

The star of a new TV drama tells Steve Pratt about her amazing trip to India

MAKING the two-part ITV1 drama Losing Gemma in India meant the cast went on a real journey together. The thriller - about two ordinary young women, Esther and Gemma, thrown together on an extraordinary trip to India - was filmed entirely on location in Delhi, Agra, Gurgaon and Goa.

"The people in India were fantastic," says one of its stars, Alice Eve, actress daughter of Waking The Dead's Trevor Eve and Holby City's Sharon Maughan. "They move to a different clock and that's a wonderful thing to learn, how starved of time we are in the West."

She also had lots of fun with the cast, which includes ex-Holby City actress Rachel Leskovac, as her travelling companion Gemma, and Jonas Armstrong, the BBC's Robin Hood.

Making the drama wasn't without incident. Eve recalls a serious scene between her and Armstrong in which they were sitting on a wall with the Taj Mahal behind them. "The art department had built a tree for the scene. We were halfway through the dialogue when it fell down on my head. I'm hoping that won't crop up on an out-takes show at some point.

"Another time, we were eating lunch in a train station in Delhi and this bird flew out of the roof into a fan. Its wing got chopped off and the whole thing landed all over mine and Rachel's food."

Making Losing Gemma was certainly different to the usual job, with the cast becoming very close as they went through their journey, says Eve. "We really supported each other through that I think. It wasn't just a jolly old time because it was tough. The story of Losing Gemma is about being tested, going through testing times.

"We didn't go to the extremes the characters go through, but there was a journey that we all went on and came out of with an overwhelming sense of accomplishment. I think everybody grew quite a lot."

In Losing Gemma, her character Esther is brought together with Gemma after a mutual friend has to drop out of a trip to India at the last moment.

By the end of the plane journey, Esther wants to go it alone but is persuaded by Gemma to socialise with an exotic couple (played by Jason Flemying and Koel Purie) that she's befriended. It all leads to some very unpleasant happenings.

The actress says Esther is very different to her. "She's quite uptight and pretentious," she says. "She's very vulnerable and tested in this story. She's had a traumatic life, so she's lost and quite bruised. I think she's lovely. There's a real tenderness to her."

Eve first caught the eye in the BBC2 series The Rotters Club before going on to star in two recent movies, Starter For Ten with James McAvoy and Big Nothing, with Friends star David Schwimmer. She's just finished a stage run in Tom Stoppard's new play Rock And Roll, putting her high on the list of rising British talent. She says everything's fantastic at the moment. "You're thrilled you've got a job and you do the work, and then the aftermath gets a bit mad."

* Losing Gemma is on ITV1 on December 18 and 19 at 9pm.