Ian Puleston-Davies plays Joe
It was a case of school friends reunited on the set of Conviction for actor
Ian Puleston-Davies.
It was the first time that drama school colleagues Puleston-Davies and
Reece Dinsdale had worked together, which made filming all the more enjoyable
for the actor from North Wales.
"It's the happiest job I've done yet - it was brilliant and will stay
with all of us forever.
"I got reacquainted with Reece after many years - we were at drama
school together and it was brilliant to see him again.
"This job really was the highlight of my career to date."
Puleston-Davies plays Joe, an old school detective in the CID, investigating
the murder of a 12-year-old girl, Angela.
However, Joe lets his emotions get the better of him and gets involved
in the murder of their prime suspect.
Puleston-Davies has made a career out of playing bad guys but he believes
that although Joe is a murderer, he is not essentially a bad person.
"I have played quite a few paedophiles," jokes Puleston-Davies.
"In fact for a while I cornered the market for paedophiles and heroin
addicts. I used to think I was filed under P for Puleston-Davies but I
wasn't, it was P for playing Paedophiles!
I do get pulled in for all the bad guy parts.
"Joe's an old-fashioned policeman - think Bodie and Doyle. Think The
Professionals. Think the old hard-nuts.
"Joe thinks of yesteryear and wishes that the force had the clout
it once had. But essentially he's not a bad man.
"There's no evil, no badness in the guy, he's just become distracted
and his motives and sense of moral justice have become warped.
"He just loses it - he's got this temper and unfortunately Jason
Buliegh gets in the way."
Joe has a lot of guilt, which is plaguing him from a previous murder
case and spills over into the investigations into the 'Little Angela'
murder.
Explains Puleston-Davies: "He's carrying huge guilt from a previous case
that went horribly wrong. He took complete responsibility for that, and
it hasn't gone away and so it's eating away inside his conscience.
"Whether it has turned him into the vigilante, that people say he's
become, I don't know but it has dogged him over the years.
"He's got confused with what is right and what is wrong and this
vigilante attitude is purely because he's a loving family man. He feels
that Buliegh is a threat to Joe, his family and everyone like them.
"There are great contradictions in his character which is so interesting
to play. Although Joe has done this terrible thing, he still cares about
his wife and daughter and he cares about Chrissie and his colleagues.
"I'm not saying he'd stop a bullet for any of them, but I think
that there is some sort of affection there."
This exploration into how a murder affects not only those connected with
the victim but also the perpetrator is something that makes Conviction
stand out from the average crime drama.
The police officers are not portrayed as the whiter-than-white paragons
of virtue normally associated with other shows in this genre. Joe and
Chrissie are real humans with real emotions and fallibilities.
"People see the police as good people," explains Puleston-Davies.
"We see them as almost unnaturally moral and that's why people are so
shocked when they read headlines like 'Copper murders wife' or 'Constable
of 30 years on the beat found with a prostitute'.
"We forget they are just like you and me. We build up this veneer of
an old fashioned cop so that when they get found out it's more shocking
than a pop star, or a man down your local pub."
When Chrissie starts to freak out about what they have done, it's left
to Joe to take command of the situation.
In an almost clinical fashion, he dictates exactly how they deal with
the minutiae and continually emphasises to Chrissie how they will not
be found out if they just keep their cool.
"Chrissie becomes the 'what if' guy," explains Puleston-Davies. "He's
always questioning - 'What if this happens? What do we do?'
"He starts to lose it because he is very aware of their situation
and its consequences - he's looking ahead to what could or will happen.
"Joe just thinks of the here and now - 'This is what we do: we get
rid of the clothes, we burn the evidence'.
"On the one hand Joe's reaction makes him look level-headed but
he's not.
"The fact is that he cannot bear to face the circumstances of what
the future will hold and that's why I suspect he actually holds it together
for so long.
"But Joe is like a tomato that is being pumped up until it explodes -
he is so level-headed in such narrow margins. He has this Jekyll and Hyde
side to him.
"It is the complete dark turmoil, which is spinning around in his
head that will eventually be his undoing."
Puleston-Davies is also a writer, having co-written the ITV1 drama Dirty
Filthy Love, a semi-autobiographical story about a man with Obsessive
Compulsive Disorder (OCD) which transmits in late September 2004.
And Puleston-Davies had nothing but admiration for Bill Gallagher's Conviction
script and Red Production Company's dedication to producing original drama.
"Maybe being a writer makes me a little more obsessed about the work,"
says Puleston-Davies, "but what it does give me is even more respect for
the writers when they get it right because I know what the process is
like.
"If Red hadn't made Conviction, I don't believe the six of us that were
cast would have been playing the leads. Any other production company would
have been, 'Ian who?' I've lost jobs before now because I'm not a big
name.
"We were all joking in the first week of filming and choosing an
alternative high profile cast - we were sure that it would have included
Ross Kemp, Martin Kemp and Paul Nicholls!
"But Red are one of the few production houses who first and foremost
want to tell a good story and then find the actors who are good storytellers."
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