Lilies by Heidi Thomas - a new drama series for 91Èȱ¬ One: Liverpool, 1920. Three girls on the edge of womanhood, a world on the brink of change
Brian McCardie plays Dadda
Actor Brian McCardie, at 41,
may seem a tad young to be a father figure – but he wears
the patriarchal mantle of Dadda in authoritarian style in Heidi
Thomas's new 91Èȱ¬ One contemporary drama series, Lilies, set in the
docklands area of post-First World War Liverpool.
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Dadda is an Ulsterman. He is a man of passionate convictions and his love for his family is his blessing and his curse – it defines him, but he cannot always express it. Labouring under the delusion that he has some sort of authority in his home, he is as much of a child as his children – and they know it. He shares their energy, their cussedness and their pride. But when he, too, seeks love, and seems to find it, the family is almost destroyed.
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Dadda is the widowed father of five grown-up children – one son has been killed in the First World War – and Brian admits to Doreen Brooks that playing an older character was one of the challenges of his role.
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"It was daunting, but I just felt that, in the final analysis, the scripts were too good to let fear be a major factor for me," he says. "Also, if Tony Garnett [executive producer with Heidi Thomas] has enough faith, then I'm not going to argue too strongly with Tony – he's had 40 years of experience!"
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Brian, whose TV credits include Murphy's Law, Sea Of Souls, The Bill and Taggart, found the character of Dadda appealing, mainly because of Heidi's scripts.
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Dadda and Mamma, his late wife and a Catholic, were so in love that they bulldozed religious barriers to marry, bringing up the boys in his faith and the girls in hers.
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"Heidi was doing a fictional riff on her personal family background," he explains. "It meant that she didn't steer into sentimentality or take easy answers in the writing. It almost reads as if she had a duty to tell that family's story, warts and all.
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"That appealed greatly, plus the fact that he's a Northern Irish Orangeman and his three daughters have been brought up as Catholic; and the fact that the front room's dedicated to the Virgin Mary and the back room to King Billy. I thought it was an intelligent premise!" he smiles.
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Brian had little time for research: he finished shooting Murphy's Law in Dublin on a Saturday and began filming Lilies in Liverpool on the Monday.
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"But I went to Carrickfergus and to Ballymena in the area of where Dadda Moss came from and I also went up the Shankill Road in Belfast and went into a few of the historical shops to buy some literature and DVDs and CDs of Orange music.
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"Dadda Moss is not a particularly sympathetic character," declares Brian. "I think he's a lovely guy because his heart is too big for his body and he'd walk through fire face first for any one of his children and they know that.
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"But, at the same time, he's not genteel in any way, shape or form. The stories that I hear from my own parents and from other people indicate that in 1920 there was a different kind of morality in terms of strictness in the family home and there was a lot less fear about shouting at your children. There was no such thing as political correctness."
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He adds: "Also, there was no welfare state, medical care wasn't very good and a whole generation of men had been lost in the First World War. So I think it was a very traumatised society and to paint it all with rose-tinted specs would, I think, be doing those people a disservice. They were very hard times."
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Brian also discovered that immigration from Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland to Liverpool and Glasgow created much tension at the time in both cities.
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"I think one of the most interesting things is that Liverpool still feels a bit like a Celtic city," he comments. "It feels like a mix between an English city and a Celtic city. They say that two out of three people from Merseyside can claim Irish heritage, and there's definitely a more Celtic feel about it than other Northern English cities that I've been to.
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Brian explains that Lilies is set around the period that Michael Collins was about to come to London to negotiate the partition of Ireland – "so they were very brutal and serious times," he adds.
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Dadda has his hands full with his daughters Ruby, May and Iris.
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"They're all three very strong young women, to say the least, and even though he's quite harsh with them at times, or strict, they've grown up with him their whole lives," says Brian. And he reveals: "In my own family, when my dad tried to be strict with my two wee sisters, he just regularly failed!"
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The Moss family, though, is close-knit. "Apart from the love that's in the family, which hopefully is obvious, you're also talking about a kind of society that doesn't have any safety net, so there's a bigger necessity and motivation for the family to hold together and to trust each other," adds Brian.
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Dadda, for whom there's a whiff of romance later in the series, makes his living from amateur vetting and being a herbalist.
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Explains Brian: "He grew up on a farm in an isolated part of Northern Ireland and his mother used to be a herbalist and would help cure some diseases and ailments when he was growing up, so he learned from her."
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The Lanarkshire-born actor, who also has two brothers, has starred on the big screen several times, including the Scottish epic Rob Roy, with Liam Neeson, and The Ghost And The Darkness, with Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer.
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His sole criterion, though, is quality. "My only preference is for good scripts, so if they come in theatre, television or film, it doesn't matter," he declares. "It's better to be in a really well-written television programme than a terrible film."
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He'll be seen on the small screen again in the new 91Èȱ¬ series Warriors. Each programme spotlights a different historical warrior and Brian is starring as Cortez.
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He does try, though, to make it home to Edinburgh as often as possible. "My whole family, more or less, is there and we're very close," he adds. Rather like Dadda's...
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