Daniel Peak is the writer of Sky’s Code 404, which returns to screens this week for a third run. The series blends cop show, sci-fi and sitcom to produce a unique blend that’s resonated with audiences. Just before season 3 began, Peak chatted with Paul Simpson about how the game is once again afoot…

 

 

Thank you for a fun series. When I first saw the description for it, my immediate reaction was ‘Somebody’s else has watched Holmes & Yoyo’, that old John Schuck show.

I promise, I’d never heard of Holmes & Yoyo until people started comparing Code 404 to it and then I had a bit of a Google and watched. It was terrific. Have you ever seen an actual episode?

I watched it when it was live!

I’ve only seen clips.

I’ve often thought that somebody was going to take that idea but do it with the budgets we’ve got nowadays and it’s surprised me it took as long as it did to get  to Code 404.

Yes, I think you’re right about that. There are tons of other films and shows out there with a similar premise, people being resuscitated with the help of technology – whether it’s The Six Million Dollar Man or various other iterations of it – but I don’t think anyone’s done it quite the same way as us.

The way I’ve always tried to get around comparisons to other shows is to refer to as many of them as possible! In the first series there were two other cops who mocked John Major quite often and they would just say ‘Oh look here they come, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)’,  just as a way of telling the audience ‘Yes, we know other people have been here before.’ I never put in a Holmes & Yoyo reference because I think so few people would get it.

But that’s the beauty of an Easter Egg like that is that five people will get it!

Yes. The one that I did use that got taken out was Barry and Boing [a comic strip in Knockout weekly]. Those comics were mainly funnies but they would have one or two serious action strips and one of those was called Barry and Boing. It was about a young boy who befriended a robot and the two of them went on the run together, it was really good. I referred to Barry and Boing and nobody had a clue what I was talking about so that came out.

How did you become involved with Code 404?

It was not initially my idea. Sam Myer, of Water & Power who’s one of the producers, I think had an idea for a straight-ish version of this concept. Two cops, one is murdered in the line of duty and is brought back with the help of technology. I think his idea was that it would be quite cerebral and a little philosophical, to do with the struggle to understand one’s own identity and things like that. Then they thought, ‘No, we don’t like that idea so much. Let’s just do a stupid version of the same thing.’ And that’s when they brought it to me as a one page pitch document. So I picked it up from there.

I guess what appealed to me about it, and the reason I was so keen to do it, is, as you said, it felt like an idea that had been done before but never quite this way. Nobody had done a quite broad sitcom version of that idea.

What do you think from your previous work that made them think you were the right person for it?

I had worked with one of the producers before on Horrible Histories, the kids TV show. I had a relationship with him and I guess, that kind of comic sensibility was what they were looking for. I was a member of a very large team of writers on that show but I think, probably, that’s why they thought of me.

Each season has had its own series theme running through – do they come first or is it what you want to do with Major and Carver that comes first when you’re thinking of the season?

That’s a very good question. I think they go alongside each other but for series 3 I remember starting with a blank piece of paper and almost the first things that I wrote down were ‘serial killer’!

It’s really useful to have a theme for each series. Series 1 was ‘Who shot John Major?’ and it was a police conspiracy. Series 2 was a cold case and series 3 is the serial killer. Once you have that hook to hang it on, you can do what I did, which is to watch lots of serial killer movies, look for the different tropes, look for the ways that personal relationships come into that, look into how the different types of cop react on screen and build that kind of framework. Basically, draw in as many clichés as you can find and then just try and navigate a fresh path through them.

So yes, the big idea for each series, the overarching plot, has come first and then I look at how Major and Carver are going to handle this together and separately and how it will create friction between them, and so on. And hopefully how it will bring out stuff in their relationship that we have not already seen.

Particularly with six episodes a year, you don’t want to be repeating more than is vital to the central characters.

That’s right, although I think there’s a tension there because it is a sitcom and most of what I’ve written is sitcom. I think the joy of the sitcom, very often is you know exactly what to expect. You know exactly how the characters will react in a given situation and there’s some satisfaction to come from seeing your expectations met. Whereas in a cop show or a sci-fi show, the opposite is true really. On the whole the enjoyment comes from the twists and the surprises.

There’s obviously a degree of a dichotomy then because you’re writing a cop and sci-fi show and a sitcom, so you’ve got two, almost, competing forces. The image of Hugh Bonneville in Paddington 2 has come to me of him doing the splits between the trains…

He’s standing on both trains at the same time! That’s a really vivid image. It does feel like that and I guess when you have to jump from one train to the other, I would tend to jump through the sitcom window. The way I try and do both is that on the whole, there’s a kind of sitcom finish to the show which ties up the story of the week and resets things as you would see in a traditional sitcom. And then quite often there will be a little cliffhanger epilogue where another murder takes place or a new fresh character walks in or something that’s the hook for next week.

That reminds us that we’re in a serial not a series.

Yes, that’s right.

We grew up with there being a reset button every week in sitcoms. You could watch an episode from any series and it’s the same.

As a rule, they’re the shows that I enjoy the most as a viewer, really. It was new for me and a bit of a challenge to write something that you have to watch in order, that develops over time.

You’ve got one hell of a cast on this. Did you know you were writing for that central trio when you were writing season 1 or did you write season 1 and then it was cast?

The process was that I wrote a pilot script with nobody attached to it and at that time, of course, we had lots of conversations about who would be good for these characters. I had a list that wasn’t necessarily realistic. It was quite short, and Danny and Stephen were both on it.

Playing the roles they’re playing now or did you ever contemplate them the other way round?

Funnily enough, I did think of it the other way round as well but it was all so hypothetical anyway, we could have done all sorts of things.

So the pilot wasn’t written for anybody then Daniel Mays was the first to see the script because we knew we wanted him, and a great stroke of good fortune was that a) he liked it; b) he thought Stephen would be good for the other role; c) he and Stephen are old friends, so he was able to take it to him; and d) also he had worked with Anna Maxwell Martin a couple of times recently. Once he liked it, he then sent it to them and that’s how we got the three of them, I think because they thought the pilot script was fun and they all got along with each other.

We then made a pilot, which wasn’t broadcast, then the rest of the series was commissioned. So I was in a better place because not only did I know who I was writing for but I’d seen them play the roles. That made writing the rest of season 1 a lot easier and made season 2 and 3 easier as well.

Are they delivering what you write or is there the usual amalgamation of their input and yours once it’s actually in front of the camera?

They put quite a lot of work in. What’s great is that because it is quite tightly plotted for a twenty-four minute show, there are a lot of lines that you can’t mess with because there’s a lot of information and a lot of exposition, but I would say all three actors and the director Al Campbell absolutely respect that and seem to know, instinctively, what’s crucial.

Beyond that, they mess around loads. Especially Daniel Mays, he adlibs a lot and it is occasionally frustrating for me when he will adlib the punchline to a scene that beats the one that I handed to him.

Over the three series, they have adlibbed more and contributed more and there’s more of them in it.

Between seasons have you chatted with them about where they think that their characters could go?

No, they haven’t been precious about it at all in that respect, they seem to have trusted me to get on with it. Once the scripts are in, we’ll talk about it and discuss it and they’ll change things and they’ll ask questions, but in terms of overall story arcs they’ve let me get on with it, which is good.

Did Covid make much of a difference to you in terms of the writing of series 2?

The effect of Covid was that it gave me about four extra months to write series 2. The executive producers said to me, ‘Just go ahead and write it exactly as you wish us to make it, if there was no pandemic.’ So I did and then all of the headaches, of which there were plenty, were endured by other people, not by me.

There were maybe two scenes in the whole series where I was just told, ‘You can’t do that.’ I wanted a big scene at an awards ceremony at the start of series 2, and I’d planned that on quite a big scale and it became impossible. So, instead it was shown on a TV monitor in the corner of an office! There were one or two scenes in that series that take place outdoors that ordinarily would have taken place indoors but there were remarkably few of those, actually.

What do you still find challenging about writing this show?

At the risk of repeating myself, it’s probably dealing with that conflict between writing a sitcom that fulfils your expectations at the same time as trying to write a drama that confounds your expectations. Beyond that, the challenges are just simply keeping it funny, really. Just to get as many jokes into a page as possible whilst still maintaining that dramatic-ish narrative.

It needs the momentum and a good gag can kill momentum, in a sense.

That’s right, yes. A good gag can kill momentum and too much emotion can kill a joke, I suppose.

It seems the balance you’ve got is working.

Yes, I hope so. To me, first and foremost, it’s a comedy, it’s a sitcom, and to the extent that it has drama and emotion and twists, they are there in service of the comedy, rather than vice versa.

Is there a particular scene that you look back from these first three seasons and go ‘That’s the moment that epitomises this show for me’?

Yes, there’s a scene in series 1 episode 3, where Stephen and Daniel and Anna are in a parked car together. It’s a very small, intimate scene and all three of them are talking at cross purposes at the same time, without eye contact. I just like that because I think it encapsulates the relationships that are at the heart of it, in quite a small way. And because I think it’s funny.

 

Code 404 airs on Sky Comedy and NOW on Thursdays; the whole box set of series 3 is also now available.

Thanks to Molly Wyatt for assistance in arranging this interview