“You always look at your past through a certain lens. But in this show, the lens gets moved to a different angle.” Jenna Coleman is talking to the Big Issue about her new detective drama The Jetty, which explores themes of consent, morality and sexual awakenings in a small Lancashire tourist town.
From Doctor Who to lockdown hit The Serpent, Coleman is at her best when she is being cool and enigmatic. And that’s how the show begins, when we meet detective Ember Manning, policing with panache in the small town in the Lancashire Lakes where she grew up.
There she is schooling her younger male sidekick in feminism, questioning a true crime podcaster’s morals, trading cynical asides with her teenage daughter Hannah. All Manning’s life has been here. And all her secrets are here too.
When a wealthy newcomer’s boathouse burns? She talks about how “the tourists own properties and locals can’t afford to” while refusing to pander to his “massive sense of entitlement”.
“She’s investigating people she probably played with on the street,” says Coleman. “Now she’s calling out their behaviours but they look at her not as a cop, but as the little girl who used to run around the neighbourhood. She had her first snog in that boathouse. Now it’s a tourist town. You feel that evolution in her and the place.”
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The series was created by Cat Jones, informed by her previous work as writer-in-residence at HMP Lowdham Grange in Nottinghamshire.
“I spent five years working in prisons, and it was such a formative thing,” Jones says. “The stories you hear, the people you meet. Prisons aren’t full of people who’ve had loads of opportunities. It’s impacted my writing – I don’t write characters who are entirely villainous or heroic because I don’t know any people who are.
“Working in prisons, you have to feel people can be redeemed. That we can make mistakes and then go on and do something different and better tomorrow. I think that’s the case with pretty much all the characters in The Jetty.”
Jones says of her lead character: “If I was calling the police, Manning is the detective I’d want to turn up. But then…”
But then indeed. Because DS Manning is also vigilantly trying to protect the local schoolgirls from predatory men. This is the unnamed town that #MeToo forgot. Even here, Manning seems to have everything under control. Until she doesn’t.
Archie Renaux as Hitch and Jenna Coleman as detective Ember Manning leave a crime scene in The Jetty. Image: BBC
“It was one of my favourite things about it,” says Jenna Coleman. “You meet Ember at a time where she’s so sardonic and so comfortable in who she is. But every time she takes a step forward in exploring this case, it leaves her whole past unravelling behind her. That push-pull energy as a character is really interesting to play.”
There is a great unravelling. Control is lost. Control over the case Ember is investigating – how the boathouse fire could be connected to a missing person case involving a teenage girl – and even control of her own personal narrative.
So much of the theme of the series is reflected in a setting that Coleman describes as “where beauty meets darkness. There is an ominous presence,” she adds. “Mysteries, unresolved trauma, secrets in the water.”
Miranda Ashby has just turned 16 and is pregnant. As detective Manning tries to find out who the father could be, and whether a crime has been committed, her daughter calls her out. After all, wasn’t Manning only just 16 when she became pregnant. What’s the difference? And here, the show asks tough questions, providing no easy answers.
“She is charging towards the truth of the story, but it sets off these explosions in her own life,” says Coleman. “It’s very much a story about her awakening. And the reframing of her past to understand who she is.
“So Ember suddenly sees everything differently and herself differently and has to deal with the consequences of how that unfolds.”
Jones, who is making her BBC primetime debut, also took inspiration from her own youth. The relationships she saw, the men in cars at the school gate. “I knew a few different girls who had relationships with guys who were grown men when these girls were underage,” she says. “And I think about them quite a lot.
“At the time, we all viewed it as very exciting – these older guys had their own cars. I think about those girls now. Do they look back and go ‘I was groomed, I was abused’? Or do they look back and go, ‘No, it was OK.’ Or are they still with that person – and does still being with that person make it more OK?”
These are provocative questions. And will stir up discussion. Jones introduces the Darwinian concept of ‘naive prey’ via podcaster Riz (I May Destroy You’s Weruche Opia), who is investigating the same cold case as Manning (an increasingly common trope in crime dramas these days – see also Karen Pirie).
Comparing the town’s young girls, unable or unaware of the need to fight off older men to animals failing to understand the dangers from predators in the wild is, again, provocative. Which is exactly what Jenna Coleman is aiming for.
“That’s the beauty of theatre, art, writing, television, film. It is the most amazing medium to be able to do that,” says Coleman.
“The Jetty is probing and uncomfortable because it asks a lot of questions but doesn’t answer them. That’s why it is so nuanced and complex.
“There isn’t a single blanket answer you can apply on consent and blurred boundaries and sexual awakenings. It’s such an individual path.
“How do you apply one rule book to these girls who are technically the same age, when they’re so different? It does reframe the story. It is uncomfortable.
“And it makes you sit in your own past. Because you have those moments in your life where you think you’re an adult. Then you look back and go, oh, you were such a baby.
“Also, my mum had me and my brother really young. A close friend of mine had her daughter when she was 18. And it is a really interesting dynamic when you’re so close in age – where the parent becomes the teenager and the child becomes the parent. So it’s refreshing to see it on screen.”
Jenna Coleman 38, was born in Blackpool and turned down a place at the University of York to take her debut role in Emmerdale in 2005. Her breakthrough role came in 2012 as companion to Matt Smith’s Time Lord in Doctor Who.
The day before our interview she reveals she is expecting her first child with director partner Jamie Childs. She is also keen to defy our expectations of her on screen.
“I’ve had my thriller time,” she says. So next, she’s playing the ‘real-life Moneypenny’, Joan Bright, in The War Rooms. But first? Enter Sandman, Neil Gaiman’s gothic fantasy drama.
“I feel really un-typecast in it,” says Coleman, who is working on series two now. “I play this pessimistic, tortured, lone wolf exorcist, so you get your comic book, dark fantasy gothic time. And that is so fun. Because you have to keep shape-shifting.
“After all these intense, internalised characters, I’m like, bring on Virginia Woolf! Bring on someone who wants to scream and shout and be more emotionally immediate.”
She is also seeing a lot of scripts that could, like The Jetty, be described as post- #MeToo dramas. Given the time lag in producing film and TV, it has taken years for these stories exploring toxic masculinities, coercive control, or workplace misogyny to get made.
“I am still reading loads of interesting scripts like that,” says Jenna Coleman. “So it’s about finding ones where it’s nuanced and explorative and not too simplistic. Observation and studying and probing is a good space to sit in.”
All episodes of The Jetty are on BBC iPlayer now; the first episode airs on BBC One at 9pm tonight (15 July).
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