Latest news with #Finneran
The Guardian
16-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Protection review – Siobhan Finneran fires on all cylinders in this tasty crime drama
Always and forever when I see Siobhan Finneran on screen I am catapulted back nearly 40 years to her mardy teen outrage in the 1987 film Rita, Sue and Bob Too as she objects to Sue always going first when they are out shagging Bob in his car on the moors. 'It's not so good, t'second time!' It's the funniest, bleakest thing you'll ever see. Finneran has worked consistently ever since, but in recent years she has really come into her kingdom as a brilliant character actor – the woman you go to when you need someone to play a marrow-deep weariness with the world. Most notably this has been employed by Sally Wainwright in Happy Valley, in which Finneran played Sgt Catherine Cawood's struggling, vulnerable, recovering/lapsing addict sister, Clare, smashing Catherine's and viewers' hearts into pieces at several points along the way, before we all gamely picked ourselves up and carried on, as Finneran's characters tend to do. Now, for the first time, she is in the lead role of a television drama – DI Liz Nyles in Protection, a six-part thriller written by Kris Mrksa, about a family living under the witness protection scheme (about 3,000 people in the UK do at any one time, according to a caption at the start) and the special branch officers in charge of it. Nyles is pretty much your standard ITV thriller-issue cop. She has a teenage-borderline-troublesome daughter, an unpleasant ex-husband, and caring duties for a cantankerous dad (David Hayman), himself a former police officer, with whom Liz has endured a difficult relationship all her life. He is now suffering from the after-effects of a stroke and a new diagnosis of dementia. As a little light relief, Nyles is having an affair with her married colleague DS Paul Brandice (Barry Ward). Jimmy McLennan (Kris Hitchen) is living in a safe house with his wife, Helen (Catherine Tyldesley), and daughter, Amy (Tilly Kaye), under the protection of a team led by Nyles while he waits to give evidence against a local drug baron, Eddie Crowther (Alec Newman). The day before he is due to appear in court, two masked men burst in and kill both parents. Amy hides and survives. Brandice is badly injured trying to save the family. The problem is that the McLennans were not his case and he shouldn't have been there. Shouldn't have known about them, and certainly shouldn't have known where to find them. Was he the source of the leak that led to the murders, and was it pillow talk from Nyles that provided him with the information? If so, has he been using her from the start? What lengths will Nyles go to to protect herself from discovery and from jeopardising the promotion she is due to get? And with those pieces in play, off we go. Only one episode was available for review but it seems a tasty setup, everything feels confidently executed and the twists and turns (including whether Dad had his own flirtations with corruption that his daughter now fears may come back to bite her) come at nicely paced intervals. Yes, we are asked to believe that when a suitable safe house cannot be found for the orphaned Amy, Nyles takes her to live in her family home instead, and that Nyles can break into Brandice's car to recover the phone he used to conduct their affair in more or less full view of the officers at the murder scene, but do we mind much about stretching the bounds of believability? No, not really. We all understand that we are not watching The Wire. That said, the sense that this is a very great waste of Finneran's talents does obtrude and threaten to spoil the game at times. As a general rule, actors graduate from meaty second-string roles to simpler leads and then, if the gods are smiling on them, on to the tiny handful of meaty lead roles that are created each commissioning round. This is unquestionably a simple role for Finneran, compared with her Happy Valley stints and many, many more, but she brings everything she has to it and it is great, undemanding fun to watch. If it is the springboard to other, greater, more challenging main roles in the future, so very much the better, for her and all of us. Protection aired on ITV1 and is on ITVX now.
The Independent
16-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Happy Valley's Siobhan Finneran: ‘We're all a bit of a mess, blundering our way through stuff'
Siobhan Finneran reckons she's 'not very good with dates'. But she can remember exactly what she was doing the morning after the first episode of Happy Valley 's final season aired – because she ended up having to do an accidental victory lap of one of the North West's least glamorous locations. 'It was at the start of '23, wasn't it?' recalls the actor, who played Clare Cartwright, recovering addict and younger sister to Sarah Lancashire's indefatigable police officer Catherine Cawood, in all three series of the brilliant, Bafta-winning drama. 'I was flying to Iceland to make a film called The Damned, so I was at Manchester airport. I have never experienced anything like that, because in most of the queues I stood in to get on the aeroplane, everybody had watched it the night before.' They all seemed to want a post-show debrief, from the security officers screening her luggage to her fellow passengers. 'Everybody loved it, so you can't moan about that, can you?' she reasons. 'I just went red a lot, and felt a bit sweaty.' Speaking over Zoom, Finneran's perched on a chintzy floral sofa, a vape just sneaking into the camera frame (she's recently quit smoking). Chatting with her is enjoyably straightforward and entirely free from actorly earnestness, delivered in that recognisable Oldham accent (she was born in Manchester, then her family moved out to Saddleworth, near the Pennines, a few years later; she's still based there now). Whether she's playing someone like Clare, who is at once endearing and deeply frustrating, resilient in some ways but fragile in so many others, or a larger-than-life comic creation shot through with realism, as she does in shows such as Alma's Not Normal or The Other One, Finneran has a habit of making her characters feel like people you actually know. They seem like someone you might bump into at the shops or, indeed, in the airport queue. And when she's part of a sprawling ensemble, it's often her performance that sticks in the memory long afterwards. Just think of her role as chaplain Marie-Louise in Jimmy McGovern's Time, a glimmer of warmth in the prison drama 's bleakness. Or her turn as scheming lady's maid Sarah O'Brien in Downton Abbey, unforgettable for very different reasons. Her career kicked off when she turned up for a casting call for Rita, Sue and Bob Too, Alan Clarke's 1987 comedy about a married man's affair with two teenage girls, which proved controversial on its release. She was 'just delighted to have got a job', she says now, but filming was still 'terrifying' because 'you don't really know what you're doing, what it's going to look like and how it's going to be perceived'. Somehow, over the course of the ensuing four decades, Finneran hadn't taken on a lead role until she signed up to star in ITV's new crime thriller Protection. She plays Detective Inspector Liz Nyles, head of a witness protection unit. Not that it was necessarily the prospect of finally getting lead billing that drew her in, she says, pointing instead to the intrigue of this shadowy branch of policing, where officers often work under aliases to keep their professional and private lives entirely separate. 'It's very secretive, it's a very under-the-radar unit,' she says. 'I think this is probably the first time we see that told in a TV series in this way. We don't really know enough about it, but we don't know enough about it because we don't need to.' The show was based on the experiences of a real witness protection officer but, perhaps for obvious reasons, Finneran didn't get to meet with them. 'I certainly didn't go undercover,' she deadpans. 'I can't watch them when they're doing the chasing on the telly, the police,' she adds, because, despite having appeared in her fair share of crime dramas over the years, 'I find it really stressful. So I'd have been hopeless.' The sheer speed at which Liz's professional life starts to unravel, though, provides a performer of Finneran's subtlety with plenty of raw material. In the opening scenes, a carefully choreographed operation is blown up in catastrophic fashion, just before a key witness is set to testify; soon, Liz is forced to grapple with the possibility that her affair with a junior colleague might have compromised the whole thing. 'We have to watch Liz try and keep a lid on her own emotional journey,' Finneran says. 'To try and work out who she can trust, who she can't, has the affair she's had impacted on the people she's supposed to be keeping safe?' At the same time, her character is being pulled in different directions at home, caught between the demands of single parenting and caring for her elderly dad. 'My children are more grown up now,' she says, referring to the son and daughter she shares with her ex-husband, the actor MarkJordon. 'But a lot of people I know are at that stage where they've still got youngsters growing up, but their parents are now reliant on them. That's happening everywhere, isn't it? They're stuck in the middle, trying to deal with teenage kids and ailing parents, and becoming the parent to all of them.' Detective dramas, she notes, are gradually getting better at weaving the reality of women's lives into the story. 'I think there's room for improvement, but we'll know when that's been a success when we stop talking about it really, and it's just the norm, you know?' she says, matter-of-fact as ever. There are shades of Happy Valley in the way that Finneran's new series deals with the messy intersection between its protagonist's work and home lives. For so many viewers, the heart of that earlier show was the painfully believable sibling relationship between Finneran and Lancashire, as sisters who can rake up years-old resentments, then crack a joke in the same breath. 'One minute you're screaming about something, and two minutes later, you know, you're all sitting down and eating your tea,' Finneran sums it up. 'It's family life, isn't it?' she adds, noting that there's 'some kind of comfort' in watching 'people who look like us, and are a bit messy – we're all a bit of a mess, blundering our way through stuff'. She and Lancashire go way back – her co-star was a few years above her at Oldham Technical College, where they both studied theatre – which made summoning a sisterly dynamic easier. But Finneran is also quick to sing the praises of writer and director Sally Wainwright, hailing her as 'one of the greatest storytellers'. She recalls one scene in particular, where we see Catherine putting Clare to bed after she's relapsed, ensuring that she's in the recovery position. 'There's care, there's love, there's kindness there. Scenes like that, we don't necessarily need to see them as an audience. But Sally puts them in. And, well, we invest more in them, don't we?' More Happy Valley is off the cards – and feels unnecessary, after that nerve-shredding ending – but can we expect another collaboration in the future? 'Oh, I don't know, darling,' she says (Finneran peppers her conversation with 'darling' – the slightly abbreviated northern version, as opposed to the more elongated, theatrical kind). 'I love her stuff. I absolutely love her stuff. So I hope so, at some point.' If you glance at Finneran's back catalogue, especially in recent years, you'll see some quite harrowing subject matter; from Happy Valley to Time 's bleak portrayal of the prison system to real-life stories such as The Moorside, about the Shannon Matthews abduction case, and The Reckoning, which dealt with Jimmy Savile's crimes. She's pragmatic when she describes how she tends to choose her work. 'It's not necessarily that I think, 'oh, that needs to be heard, that needs to be said, I need to be involved in the making of that,'' she says. 'It can just depend on what drops on that day.' Alternating the hard-hitting material with comedy roles prevents her from feeling weighed down, too. 'I was very, very lucky that when I finished doing Protection, I went on to make the second series of Alma's Not Normal,' she says. 'So that was the complete antithesis of what I'd just done. I can't say that I'd have been desperate to do another big, heavy drama on the back of [ Protection ], because you can kind of go, 'that's enough of that for the time being. Let's change it up and go and do something different.'' In Alma's Not Normal, Sophie Willan's semi-autobiographical, Bolton-set comedy, Finneran dons outlandish wigs and fake teeth to play the title character's mum Lin, who is dealing with a heroin addiction and mental health problems. Not exactly the breezy stuff of sitcoms, you might think, but 'Sophie manages to make really hard-hitting political points about the state of welfare, social care and stuff like that, without you feeling like you're having it rammed down your throat,' Finneran says. 'She's not doing a party political broadcast. She's just making a statement, and in the mix of that, we're also laughing at the situations the characters have got themselves into' – and 'question[ing] whether we should be laughing so hard'. A show like Alma, she adds, brings bigger issues to life, because it lives on in our memories in a way that a news bulletin doesn't. 'We can listen to LBC all day and listen to what a state the country's in, how angry people are, and yes, we can learn from that. But I think with something like Alma's Not Normal, it just stays with you that bit longer.' I wonder whether Finneran thinks there's much space for aspiring writers from working-class backgrounds – like Willan's, and Wainwright's – to carve out careers right now, as the TV industry seems more precarious than ever. 'Gosh, I hope so, darling. Because without that, what are we going to be left with?' She points to Time writer Jimmy McGovern's dedication to 'bringing up young writers' and 'newcomers' (because 'they're not all young!'). 'You have to hope there will always be people like that in the industry to encourage and support.' Up next for Finneran is Out of the Dust, a psychological thriller set in a conservative Christian sect. So, if she's sticking to her usual pattern (a bleak one, then a funny one), she's probably overdue a bit of comedic respite. Whatever form that comes in, I predict it might just provoke more compliments in the airport queue.
The Guardian
07-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Hiya' – my brutally honest hour with Siobhan Finneran, the unsung queen of TV
It may be one of the most devastating scenes in the history of British television. In the final series of Happy Valley, Catherine Cawood begins to understand that her sister Clare has betrayed her, and has been lying about where she is. Catherine watches Clare from outside a cafe, then walks in, sits down at Clare's table and says one iconic word: 'Hiya.' Siobhan Finneran, who played Clare for a decade, pops up on my laptop screen. Surely there is only one way to start the conversation. 'Hiya,' I deadpan, in my best Sarah Lancashire voice. 'Hiya,' Finneran says, cheerfully. 'No,' I say, and try again. 'Hiya.' She smiles politely. Surely you get 'hiya' all the time? 'Where's that from? Benidorm?' she asks. Finneran is perched on a floral sofa, vape in hand. She stopped smoking six months ago, and this has helped keep her off the cigarettes. 'Oh, it's revolting, darlin,' she says. (She says darling a lot, more a northern 'darlin' than a luvvie's 'dahling'). Finneran grew up in Oldham and still lives in Saddleworth. 'I keep buying the worst ones in the vain hope that I'll stop. This is called Strawberry Ice.' She giggles. 'Absolutely ridiculous. It's embarrassing asking for them: 'Two packets of Watermelon Surprise for me.' Awful!' She'd much rather have a rollie, she admits. 'I liked smoking, all day long. So it's meant I'm not doing that, which is great. But at some point, it will stop. We hope.' From Happy Valley to Downton Abbey to Alma's Not Normal, Finneran is a fixture of quality British television. But, amazingly, despite a career so lengthy she had her first role in 1987 and spent nearly a decade in TV sitcom Benidorm, it is only now, in her late 50s, that she is about to get her first top billing in the new ITV thriller Protection. She plays DI Liz Nyles, who runs a witness protection scheme. Can it really be right that this is her first leading role on TV? 'Yeah, maybe, darlin. I don't know. Probably? I'm trying to think. It probably is.' She is clearly not bothered by it. 'As long as I can get up and do my job and I can remember my words, that's really what it's all about, because I'm much happier, as you always are on a set, working in a team.' I was so gripped by Protection that I was shouting at the screen. It puts practically every character, on all sides of the law, in danger, and refuses to let you trust anyone as deception builds upon deception. 'That's good, if you're shouting at the telly. I do that all the time. You should go on Gogglebox.' Maybe she should go on Gogglebox. 'But I don't like being on telly other than playing a character. And I'm not sure people need to see me eating bags of Revels and shouting things at the telly.' She likes her private life to be private. Interviews, she says, are 'like a form of torture. You haven't got a character to hide behind. But I've got my vape and a glass of water, so I'm all right.' She is happy to talk about acting, though. 'Oh, I can talk to you about that, darlin, I can easily talk to you about that,' she says. Her grandmother was a seamstress who loved the theatre. As one of the oldest grandchildren, Finneran would be taken on day trips, getting the train down to the RSC in Stratford-upon-Avon to see whatever was on at the time. 'Something must have gone in, or something must have excited me, or there was something I was fascinated by,' she says. She always knew, somehow, that acting was what she'd always wanted to do. 'But I didn't really understand how you got into it.' A careers adviser nudged her towards what was then Oldham Technical College, and its theatre studies A-level course. Jane Horrocks went there. Sarah Lancashire was a couple of years above her. 'We did think we were like the kids from Fame. We'd do music, dancing, singing, and then we'd do acting.' She was there for two years, and when she left, did 'bog standard jobs' for a while. Through a friend's mum, she heard about a casting call for a film called Rita, Sue and Bob Too. She was 19 when she got the part of Rita. The now celebrated British film, about a married man who has an affair with two schoolgirls, was written by the late Andrea Dunbar, who adapted it from her play, and was set and filmed on an estate in Bradford. It was 40 years ago, she points out. 'And I can't remember what I had for my breakfast! I just remember it being a bit of a blur. I was probably terrified every day. It was like another language. It was another world, completely, that I knew nothing about.' For a long time after that, she didn't act at all, even though it seems, to the casual observer, as if she's been working solidly ever since. 'That's a really great myth,' she laughs, good-naturedly. Over the years, she did the soaps (Coronation Street and Emmerdale), plenty of dramas and a handful of early Sally Wainwright shows. 'I've only been in work consistently, I would say, for the last 19 years. I've done the complete opposite to a lot of people. I hit 40, and started to pick up regular characters, as opposed to three lines as the woman who lives next door, or, you know, a scene as the sister-in-law.' In her 30s, she did turn up as a regular in Paul Abbott's Clocking Off, alongside her old friend Sarah Lancashire, but after that, she had another period of not working. 'You sometimes look back and think, yeah, I made a decision not to work when the children were small.' She has two children, now in their late 20s. 'But I don't think I'd made a decision. I think there probably wasn't a lot of work coming in, and that just fitted in quite brilliantly with the fact that I had two kids under the age of two.' Towards the end of the 00s, that all began to shift. In 2007, Finneran was cast as the mouthy matriarch Janice Garvey in the hit holiday sitcom Benidorm. A couple of years later, she appeared as the vicious housekeeper Sarah O'Brien, a villain of early Downton Abbey, where she remained for three series. 'People were seeing me playing the wonderful and loud and fabulous Janice Garvey in a comedy, and then they were watching me playing, again, a fabulous, but completely nasty piece of work, Miss O'Brien. I don't know if people were sitting at home going, oh, she can do that, and she can do a bit of that. That might be what it was.' Does she have any idea why her career took off after she turned 40? 'I don't, really. I'd never been the princess. A lot of the actresses I know were the pretty ones who, from leaving drama school, could play the girlfriend or the pretty sister. I was never in that casting bracket.' But with Benidorm and Downton, she found her feet. 'I was just very lucky that those two jobs, that were so very different, were happening around the same time. It's the luck of the Irish, isn't it?' Sign up to What's On Get the best TV reviews, news and features in your inbox every Monday after newsletter promotion Finneran is from a big Irish family. 'My dad's from Ireland. My mum's family were Irish. My mother's father's family was Scottish. I am a bit desperate to do one of those … what are they called?' I assume she means the BBC genealogy series, Who Do You Think You Are?, but when I suggest that, she hoots. 'No! I do love watching that, and I'm nosy enough to want to find out more about my family. But I mean those DNA tests,' she laughs. In recent years, she has appeared in two knockout shows. She remembers getting the script for the first three episodes of Happy Valley. 'I couldn't breathe, reading those scripts. I sometimes lose the will to live, reading [scripts], because you just think, what is this? That's me being really brutally honest. But with that, I remember ringing my agent the next day and going; 'Oh my God, it is fucking brilliant.'' It meant she got to work with Lancashire again. 'I love working with Sarah. We have a good time together. And I think that sisters relationship is just so true to life. One minute, they're literally spitting at each other and the next they're making each other a cup of tea and having a chat.' And then there was Alma's Not Normal, in which she plays Lin, Alma's mother and another long-term addict with mental health issues, who is repeatedly let down by social services and the state. 'It's like I've said about Happy Valley: you get a script like that, and you'd have to have some serious holiday booked, or you'd cancel a holiday for that. You just go, this is a work of genius.' She was scared of playing Lin at first, because the character is 'very, very big'.'If you think about an unfiltered, unedited six-year-old, it's sort of that energy. She does say exactly what she thinks about things, and it's probably what everybody else is thinking. She just says it. She's honest. And what I love about her is that she's optimistic, still. She's still got hope. And you think, how the fuck, when you've been treated the way she's been treated? That's massively appealing to me, in another human being.' I wonder if Finneran feels optimistic about the gloomy state of British television. Amid budgets cuts and slashed production rates, what does she think the future holds? 'I don't understand that, in terms of the production companies. From my point of view, what I see is really brilliant actor mates of mine who are not getting any work. I've never known the industry be as bleak, in terms of that. And I mean people who consistently have worked for the last 30 years, who've spent the last two or three years with nothing.' She hopes it will pick up soon. 'We've been told for the past two years that it was down to the strikes in America, and that next year will be better. Well, we're now two years on from that, and it doesn't seem to be picking up. I don't want to sound like a wanker saying that, because I have had work, so I know there's stuff being made. But I just know there's not the quantity of work that was being made maybe even five years ago.' I don't think you sound like a wanker. 'Well, that's good,' she says. 'But it's tough out there. And for kids starting off now, fucking hell, I don't know. So many regional theatres closing and all of that.' She pauses, vape still in hand. 'We just have to be optimistic, don't we? We have to be a bit more like Lin. Less editing of ourselves, and far more optimistic about the world.' Protection is on ITV1 and ITVX on 16 March.
Yahoo
10-02-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
What Ohio law says about dogs being kept outside during the winter
COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) – While animal welfare organizations receive an increase of calls during the winter from Ohioans who are concerned about dogs being kept outside, state law often limits when they can step in. In Ohio, there is no law restricting the tethering of a dog outside or setting a time limit for how long they can be left outdoors. However, the law does require that companion animals have access to food, water and 'adequate shelter.' Any animal that is kept inside someone's residence, as well as any dog or cat, is considered a companion animal under the law. Specifically, pets must have access to protection from the elements, including snow, rain and direct sunlight. If a 'reasonable person' would assume the animal would get sick, suffer or die as a result of the weather in the conditions they are kept in, the shelter is considered inadequate under the law. Mark Finneran, Ohio director of the Humane Society of the United States, said the vague definition in state law for adequate shelter can provide dog wardens and humane agents flexibility, but can also make the law difficult to enforce. 'Vague language can create some obstacles where [humane agents] get called out to a property and maybe they feel like it's not a good situation for the dog, but because of the way the code is written, they're not always able to move forward with charges or they're not able to give specific instructions to a property owner about 'here's exactly what you need to do in order to get up the code,'' Finneran said. Some other states, such as Tennessee, have more concrete definitions of adequate shelter, Finneran said. Some requirements in Tennessee's law include having a structure that is enclosed on all sides and contains bedding material. While there is no statewide law in Ohio restricting tethering or specific guidelines for adequate shelter, numerous cities and townships across the state have passed their own animal welfare-related ordinances. Columbus residents could be charged with a misdemeanor if a dog is chained outside between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. or during severe weather. Bexley and the city of Delaware have passed similar ordinances placing limitations on tethering, according to nonprofit rescue group Columbus Dog Connection. Multiple cities have also passed adequate shelter ordinances, including Delaware, which requires a dog shelter to, among other things, have moisture-proof floors and be raised off the ground. Finneran said if someone is concerned about the conditions a dog is being kept in, the best thing they can do is contact their local animal enforcement agency – in Franklin County, that is Columbus Humane. In Ohio, humane agents possess the power to make an arrest or take a pet if someone is found to be breaking laws regarding companion animals. Columbus Humane told NBC4 in December that providing photos and videos when leaving a tip helps them build evidence to potentially seize an animal. Chief Humane Agent Jessica Scott said when determining if shelter is adequate, the animal welfare organization considers whether the structure has four walls and a roof that protects an animal from the elements. If a resident has a friendly relationship with an individual who keeps their dog outdoors in questionable conditions, Finneran suggested talking with them and attempting to help. 'If you have a relationship with that neighbor or you feel that you can talk to them in a safe way, I always like to start with the spirit of trying to offer something to them,' Finneran said. 'If they don't have a doghouse for their dog, you can offer them an old doghouse that your neighbor or family member had that you can give to them or if they don't have bedding in a doghouse, you can offer them some straw.' The most common reasons people do not provide proper shelter to a dog comes down to an education or resource issue, rather than the individual intentionally being cruel, according to Finneran. 'A lot of times they don't realize that it's too cold for a dog, or that they just don't have the resources to be able to provide everything that dog needs,' he said. Finneran said the Humane Society of the United States is hoping the Ohio legislature will look at the state's guidelines for adequate shelter this General Assembly, and pass more specific requirements. He encouraged Ohioans to reach out to state legislators and elected officials to push for this change. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
