Virdee is a love story wrapped around a crime thriller, says author Amit Dhand

“I felt there wasn’t a South Asian character in an on-screen drama in the western world,” the 45-year-old author explains. “I grew up at a time when Goodness Gracious Me was viral. There were some really amazing global comics who were killing it. But no one had really done drama. So, I started writing Harry Virdee because I wanted to see him represented in the way I see myself. And I wanted his character to mirror the city of Bradford – light, dark, complicated.”

Virdee, a detective of Indian heritage, has so far featured in four novels, starting with Streets of Darkness, which was published in 2016. The fifth in the series, The Chemist, is due in May, when its sales will surely be boosted by the upcoming six-part BBC One series, adapted by the author from his first book.

As well as introducing a South Asian detective and promoting Bradford, Virdee is also relatively unusual in that the lead character is happily married. This again, says Dhand, was a deliberate correction of a trend: “I was aware that detectives tended to be divorcees or womanisers. Virdee is a love story wrapped around a crime thriller. I wanted a detective whose family life was the strongest thing in his world.”

The twist – and part of the powerful originality of Virdee – is that Harry and Saima’s happy marriage makes others very unhappy. Both have Indian backgrounds but he is a Sikh, she a Gujarati Muslim, a union that some in their families find unacceptable due to tensions going back to the 1947 Partition of India by the departing British colonial overlords, which created two nations, India and Pakistan, along largely religious lines.

“It’s an inter-faith marriage,” says Dhand. “We’ve seen a lot of Catholic-Protestant, Catholic-Jewish couples on screen. The fact that it’s two brown people might be unique, but the concept is not.”

Perhaps only a Jewish-Arab marriage, though, could be as dramatically freighted as Harry and Saima’s, due to the explosive geo-political context. Aysha Kala, who plays Saima, has professional experience of how this past intrudes into the present. During a TV career that includes Shameless, Indian Summers and Apple TV+’s Criminal Record, the 34-year-old actor also appeared on stage at the National Theatre in The Father and the Assassin, Anupama Chandrasekhar’s play about the historical division of – and subsequent divisions in – India.

“You couldn’t put that play on in India,” Kala says. “At the National, we had walk-outs and protests. There was one show where we got heckled. But you just have to ignore it and carry on. I feel that these tensions exist in the world and so we shouldn’t shy away from them.”

Some social media heckling may result from a racial and cultural clash in the first episode of Virdee. The BBC has embargoed any description of the moment until transmission, so I can only say that it involves a painful gesture of disrespect and that it’s one of the most extraordinary scenes I’ve seen on TV.

“I’ll take that as a compliment!” reacts Staz Nair, who plays Harry – his first British TV lead after impressing in global hits like Game of Thrones and Supergirl. “When I was playing it,” he says, “I tried to think beyond religion and to the emotions inside it. Harry has finally found what he wants with his wife and child, but there are people who won’t accept it. And he’s determined that his child won’t go through the same rejection. He has the courage to say, ‘Let bygones be bygones’, and he suffers the ultimate shame.”

Dhand adds: “The scene you refer to is old-fashioned, but authentic. It was something I’d seen on my travels to India. I thought, ‘That’s quite astonishing, I’m going to use it one day.’”

Questions of authenticity are increasingly applied to the casting process. (Daniel Craig’s lack of an Oscar nomination for his performance in Queer is attributed by some to unease about a straight man playing gay.) Kala, like her character, has a Gujarati Muslim background and says: “It’s an ongoing discussion, to what extent you should cast someone completely like the character. There are things in my background on which I draw for Saima.”

Nair, who has Indian and Russian blood, says carefully: “I think authentic casting is important, the problem is that definitions of authenticity are different. It’s not our job to represent everyone, but to represent the character we’re asked to play.”

The way in which the 33-year-old actor most identified with Harry was the character’s scars from an imperfect childhood: “Without going too much into my own life, my father wasn’t around a lot of the time when I was young. So, it’s more the complexity of family dynamics and the feeling of being abandoned and being starved of a person or emotional presence who should have been there to guide you. And the void that leaves and a desire to fill that void often not with good things.”

While acting is about transformation, there is a startling contrast between Nair on the video-call screen and Harry in the series. In character, he’s dangerous, even frightening… “Thank you!” he beams. “How strange is my job that I thank you for saying that? I take that as a compliment. I’m quite a gentle person; I was raised by my mother and I enjoy being soft. But what I wanted the viewer to feel with Harry is, ‘OK this is horrible, but I get why he’s doing it.’ You don’t condone the action, but you understand the motive.”

As soon becomes apparent in conversation, neither of the leads are Bradfordians, which demonstrates another complexity of “authentic” casting. “We had to do a lot of work on the accent,” confesses Kala. “The first meeting after getting the part was with Natalie Grady, our great dialect coach.”

Martin Freeman, who was born in Surrey yet played a Liverpudlian in The Responder, told me that he had certain phrases that he used like a tuning fork to find the voice on set. Did Nair try something similar? “Yeah. If I think about it, definitely, yeah,” he replies, in perfect Bradfordian. “Course, course, course.” Then back to his soft RP, “So, yes, you have areas you go to to find the accent. One day, one of the kids working on the show said: ‘So what part of Bradford is he from?’ That was a great moment.”

Bradford didn’t need any coaching to play the show’s location. “I think it’s one of the most cinematic cities I’ve ever seen,” says Dhand, “and I think we really reflect that on screen. The Gothic and Bohemian architecture… I’m trying to show off my city. It’s almost like a child in a toy shop –which location am I going to show today?”

The story of Virdee, though, is often very dark. Whereas the Jersey tourist board is sponsoring the impending remake of Bergerac, it’s hard to imagine the West Yorkshire tourist board endorsing Dhand’s show - although the BBC bringing it to the screen does tie in with it being designated the 2025 UK City of Culture.

“As in any city, there’s light and darkness,” he demurs. “I think Bradford’s probably been associated for too long with dark and no one ever talked about the light. The Virdee books are the bestsellers in Bradford Waterstones, they’ve got a huge following in the city. And I think in the show they’ve shot Bradford very sexily. It looks amazing. I think people should be flocking to the city after seeing the series.”

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Virdee will air on BBC One and BBC iPlayer from 9pm on Monday 10th February.

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