Stephen Hawksby

Set during the 1960s in the fictional North Yorkshire village of Aidensfield, this enduringly popular series interweaves crime and medical storylines.

A sharp detective with a messy life, DCI Vera Stanhope patrols her “patch” of northeast England, pursuing the truth in cases of murder, kidnapping, and blackmail. Vera is obsessive about her work and faces the world with caustic wit, guile and courage.

Over the course of four decades, the personal lives of a quartet of Newcastle friends—Nicky, Geordie, Mary, and Tosker—intertwine with various political machinations, often for the worse: slum housing projects, police corruption, the rise of Thatcherism, political sleaze, and specific events like the 1984 Miners' Strike.

In 2007, Gillian Wearing placed an advert – in newspapers, online, in job centers, and elsewhere. It read: “Would you like to be in a film? You can play yourself or a fictional character. Call Gillian.” Of the hundreds of people who replied, seven – chosen through an extended process of auditions, interviews, and workshops – ended up appearing in Self Made. Of those seven, five in particular use the acting technique known as Method to delve into their memories, impulses, anxieties, fears, fantasies, and inner resources to create a series of individual performance vignettes, their personal ‘end scenes’, that reveal with particular intensity and clarity who they really are deep down – or who, in another version of their lives, they might easily have been.