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Time Out
21-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Where was ‘Bookish' filmed? The unexpected locations behind the Mark Gatiss detective drama
In BBC'ss Sherlock, Mark Gatiss played the titular detective's influential older brother, Mycroft Holmes. In the new period thriller Bookish, Gatiss portrays a protagonist cut from the same cloth as Sherlock, albeit with a more supportive approach to the authorities. Gatiss is Gabriel Book, an unconventional second-hand bookseller who uses his antiquarian collection to help police solve crimes. Bookish is a return to form for the Emmy winner, who also serves as co-writer alongside broadcaster Matthew Sweet. Recreating London in 1946, Bookish serves as a delightful throwback to detective mysteries of the era while touching upon the perils of post-war Britain. Read on to discover how the detective thriller's world came to life. And if you have Gabriel Book's smarts, you'll spot that most of the filming locations were surprisingly not even in London. Namur, Belgium The heart and soul of Bookish lies in London, but the production team subtly recreated the city's post-war bleakness overseas. Most of the series was filmed in Belgium in 2024, with additional photography taking place in the UK. Namur, a city located in southern Belgium, features prominently in Bookish as the location where street sets for Archangel Lane were built. This fictional London lane is where Gabriel Book runs his second-hand bookstore, which also doubles as a base of operations for Book's investigative activities. Gare de Binche, Binche, Belgium Other Belgian filming locations for Bookish include Gare de Binche, a Gothic-style railway station in the city of Binche. The station's archaic architecture and wartime-era inscriptions freeze the passage of time, making Gare de Binche a suitable fit for the show's 1940s setting. Theater De WAANzin, Ghent, Belgium Gabriel Book's many adventures across London take him to all kinds of spots in the city, including a brief detour to a theatre. Standing in for this theatre space is Theater De WAANzin, located in the heart of Ghent, Belgium. The theatre is a cozy venue that hosts several amateur productions today. Onze-Lieve-Vrouw-Waver, Belgium Bookish's Belgian connections continue with this scenic village located a few miles from major cities like Brussels and Antwerp. Fitting the show's grim post-war realities is the Parish Church of Our Lady, the village's neo-Gothic church that remains its biggest tourist attraction. The village's town hall is also heavily influenced by Gothic Revival architecture, adding to the area's hauntingly beautiful atmosphere. What Other Belgian Locations Were Used for Filming? Other London-set scenes filmed in Belgium took place in the country's major cities, including the capital Brussels, La Louvière, Antwerp, Charleroi, Sint-Niklaas, the municipality of Londerzeel, and the village of Huizingen. Was Any of Bookish Filmed in London? Despite the majority of production taking place in Belgium, the crew did film some scenes in London as well. Beyond capturing landmarks like Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, some scenes were filmed in central London to recreate the fictional Waddingham Hotel. Several central London roads were blocked for filming, complete with vintage 1940s-style cars and old-school hotel bellhops. Other London locations include National Liberal Club, Albert Embankment, Inner Temple, and Gordon Square in Bloomsbury. Who Stars in Bookish? Sherlock actor and screenwriter Mark Gatiss takes top billing in Bookish as bookseller-turned-detective Gabriel Book. Gatiss is joined by Bridgerton and HBO's Rome star Polly Walker, who plays Book's wife Trottie, and Olivier Award-winning theatre actor Elliot Levey, who plays Inspector Bliss. Other cast members include Buket Kömür (Generation Z), Daniel Mays (A Thousand Blows), and Blake Harrison (The Inbetweeners). Where Can You Stream Bookish? Bookish is available to stream in the UK on U&Alibi. .
The Guardian
16-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Bookish review – Mark Gatiss's cosy crime drama is a tasty nugget of absolute delight
You may feel that your cosy crime dance card is full. You've done all the Richard Osmans, polished off Ludwig and that new Timothy Spall one, Death Valley, not as bleak as it sounds, and of course there's Father Brown to fall back on when you are ill and Agatha Raisin when you need cheering up. You're good. But … as with a delicious box of chocolates, which is to say any box of chocolates, there's always room for one more, isn't there? And here it is, your next flavoursome nugget of absolute delight – Bookish. This six-part detective drama was created by Mark Gatiss, written by Matthew Sweet and stars the former as Gabriel Book, a secondhand bookseller in postwar London. He carries a mysterious 'letter from Churchill' as a result of his equally mysterious service in the war and this allows him to lend a hand with any passing police investigation that catches his eye. Think of him as a legitimised semi-Sherlock if you wish. In the opening double bill, Slightly Foxed – the perfect and inevitable pun under the circumstances – the eye-catching investigation involves a plague pit uncovered at a bombsite, the apparent suicide of a local chemist via prussic acid and a lavish strewing of clues (at least one of which Book finds almost too obvious, which makes it another kind of clue altogether) and complications (missing morphine, a bloodied head but no broken skin, on top of a poisoning? Rum, old boy, altogether rum). Possible suspects include the pharmacist's semi-estranged daughter and her spiv boyfriend, the erstwhile ARP warden, Rosie Cavaliero's char lady (called Mrs Dredge to give us some Dickensian undertones to enjoy) and there are red herrings (and jade figurines) and period detail along the way. The latter ranges from the pleasingly traditional (whistleblowing bobbies, meat as a luxury item, the prevalence of powdered egg), through to the still more pleasingly niche (Georgette Heyer fandom and Book's refusal to indulge it) and on to the more difficult aspects of life in 1946 England: orphaned children making the best of new circumstances, the sweeping away of old certainties as the shellshocked population waits to see if something better or worse will rise from the rubble, the pride and sorrow attached to war heroes and those who had to care for the injured ones when they came home. Bookish delivers a ripping yarn, yes, but grief and melancholy undercut it at many turns. Alongside the self-contained plot, we have the slower burn of what precisely is going on in Book's life. He is married to Trottie (Polly Walker) and they clearly love each other dearly but sleep apart. They have recruited a young man to help in the shop while Gabriel sleuths. Jack (Connor Finch) is an orphan with no memories of his mother and only a single picture of his father, fresh out of a two-year stint in prison for his part as the getaway driver in a smash-and-grab raid in Mayfair. There are signs that the Books have taken him under their wing for motives other than altruism. There are also (God, Walker remains such a magnificent danger) signs that Mrs Book may have a taste for younger men which, if they come to fruition, will require a subcategory of cosy crime to be hastily instituted so we'll need to keep an eye on that. I don't think it counts as a spoiler to say that one gently unspooling thread of Bookish is an exploration of Book's life as a necessarily closeted gay man. It adds to the sense of sorrow that infuses the series and gives it heft, and warms the edges of Book as a character and of Gatiss – customarily quite a closed and chilly actor – to a valuable degree. There are a few tricky moments – I'm not sure I buy an opportunistic theft by a man who just happens to be carrying around a jade chess set, or why he would leave a piece behind as an entirely unconvincing substitute for a stolen figurine. I feel, too, that we could do with finding some way other than battles about apostrophe placement to demonstrate a character's intellectual superiority. But overall Bookish is a fine piece of entertainment – meticulously worked, beautifully paced and decidedly moreish. (It was commissioned for a second series before the first began.) It has enough spikiness to stop it being formulaic but enough love for the genre to keep it comforting. A joy. Bookish is on U&Alibi
Telegraph
13-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
‘So much crime and violence': the post-war London of Mark Gatiss's Bookish
London is over. So much crime and violence. So many knives and guns on the street. Too many boarded-up businesses. Too few bobbies on the beat. The details would make your hair stand on end. I've read all about them in the papers: the ones from 1946. They're all there, gloriously searchable, in the British Newspaper Archive, the digital best friend of any scholar or screenwriter who wants to explore post-war Britain – bread on ration; 18,000 Army deserters on the run; 1.5 million homeless; government debt at 252 per cent of GDP; the welfare state struggling to be born in a country hungry for change. This is the world of the new TV detective with whom, I hope, you'll soon be trying to work out whodunit. His name is Gabriel Book. He has a wife, Trottie, who sells floral wallpaper and shot a fascist in the Spanish Civil War. He has horn-rimmed spectacles, a mild and smoky voice, and a secret history. In a triumph of nominative determinism, he also has an antiquarian bookshop in a lane somewhere off the Strand. Books are Book's bag. He is the sleuth in a new six-part TV series, who does his reading, follows the references and checks the footnotes. He is created and played by Mark Gatiss, whom I have adored since the days when, as a member of the League of Gentlemen, he stuck bits of Sellotape to his face in small, hot rooms at the Edinburgh Festival. (He also co-founded something called Sherlock, reconsecrated the BBC Two Christmas ghost story and helped Russell T Davies revive Doctor Who.) We have written Book's cases together. They're not the open-and-shut kind. Bow Street will let him through the police cordon only if the problem is sufficiently outré, sufficiently fiddly. A tangle of skeletons unearthed on a bombsite. A killing on a film set. A tragic death in a grand hotel, in which an obscure Albanian legal text buzzes with significance. The year 1946 is a good moment for the gifted amateur detective who wants to get a foot in the police-station door. That year, crime was rising and police numbers were falling. Hendon Police College had shut in 1939 and showed no signs of reopening. The Met was about 4,000 officers short. Bombed-out houses, their windows blocked with cardboard, were easy pickings for thieves. Sentencing two ex-Army miscreants in March 1946, Travers Humphreys, the judge who sent John Haigh, the 'Acid Bath Murderer', to the gallows, gave his diagnosis: 'There is at present in this country a perfect orgy of breaking into shops and warehouses and stealing goods, and I regret to say that a very high proportion of the people who do that are either in or just out of the services.' Some didn't need to pick up a crowbar: that same year, a group of officers at RAF Halton were charged with smuggling champagne, cigarettes, cherry brandy and 'fancy buttons'. Guns – service-issue or trophies taken from fallen Axis combatants – added an extra element of danger. In London, a black-market revolver cost £5. The papers covered cases of veterans with twitchy trigger-fingers. Fleet Street shook its head in sympathy over William David Williams, a demobbed paratrooper who, disturbed in the night, reached instinctively for his Luger – a battlefield souvenir – and put a fatal bullet in his 16-year-old wife. It was respectful when a wing commander and his spouse were found shot dead in a locked hotel room in Bayswater. (Not much of a mystery: he murdered her and then turned the gun on himself.) Returned husbands who killed their wives for real and imagined wartime infidelities were often treated leniently by the courts and the press. Frederick Burt, who stabbed his spouse to death because 'she had a baby by an Irishman named O'Connell', received a five-year sentence. He might have served less, had he not decided to break out of prison. War trauma, it was thought, explained the actions of these men. Others tried and failed to use this defence in court. In 1946, Britain devoured the dreadful details of the case of Neville Heath, a sadist who whipped, slashed and strangled his female victims. Like Burt, Heath said he did not remember his crimes: he suffered blackouts, he claimed, after being forced to bail out of a bomber over Holland. Neither jury nor public were convinced. They were, however, fascinated. Heath evaded detection because he was good-looking, well-mannered and plausible. He went about under the alias Group Captain Rupert Brooke and was rarely questioned. The actress Moira Lister once went on a date with him and felt sure she owed her survival to her blondeness: Heath preferred brunettes. (Alfred Hitchcock, obsessed with the case, used it as the basis for Frenzy, the nastiest film he ever made.) Heath's crimes demonstrated an unanticipated legacy of the war. It gave licence to liars, particularly those in uniform. The clubrooms of England were full of phoney wing commanders and nine-bob second lieutenants. For most, signing a bad cheque might have been the extent of their criminal ambitions; but who knew? When co-writing Bookish, one of the things that struck us was the ease with which it was possible for people in this period to reinvent and misrepresent themselves. The conflict had turned the whole world upside down. Histories could be hidden in that chaos. Some thought that murder itself had been altered. George Orwell, writing in Tribune in February 1946, advanced a celebrated thesis. 'Decline of the English Murder' is a parody of that genre that will probably never go out of fashion – the hyperbolic essay about how this country is going to the dogs. But its point is perfectly serious. Orwell asks us to imagine ourselves on a Sunday afternoon in the 1930s, pleasantly full of roast beef, feet on the sofa, newspaper in our hands. 'In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about?' he asks. 'Naturally, about a murder.' Murder, he reasons, of a particular indigenous type, which, ideally, may involve a legacy, the respectable chairman of a local Conservative Party branch, a killer playing Nearer, My God, to Thee on the harmonium, while the victim drowns in the bathroom next door. The typical post-war killer, he argues, has no such genteel qualities. His Exhibit A is the so-called 'Cleft Chin' case of 1944, in which an American GI went on a killing spree with a teenage waitress from Neath who dreamt of a career in striptease. The canonical slaughters of the recent past, Orwell contends, were deeper and richer than this 'meaningless story, with its atmosphere of dance halls, movie palaces, cheap perfume, false names and stolen cars'. The crimes of Elizabeth Jones and her conspirator were a dubious foreign import, like the grey squirrel or Spam. Not all violence could be so easily dismissed. The post-war period has another characteristic that disrupts our self-image of a nation responding with sobriety to the emerging story of the Holocaust – the rise in anti-Semitism and street fascism. In late 1945, residents of Hampstead launched an 'anti-alien' petition: 'We the undersigned petition the House of Commons in a request that aliens of Hampstead should be repatriated to assure men and women of the Forces should have accommodation upon their return.' The aliens were Jewish refugees, whom they suggested should be moved into camps. An anonymous letter to the press argued that these Jews had been sent to England to subvert it. When, in April 1946, the organisers of the petition held a rally to denounce 'aliens in our midst', a group of Jewish activists, mostly ex-servicemen, began surveilling fascist groups, heckling their meetings and – more controversially – beating up their members under cover of darkness. The young Vidal Sassoon was involved. The state and the police would not protect them, so they did it themselves. They were people of their time. So, too, is Gabriel Book, who is in a marriage of the lavender kind. He and Trottie love each other but they lead separate sexual lives. This was a dangerous choice. Immediately after the war, prosecutions for 'Unnatural Offences and Indecency with other males' doubled. In the year Elizabeth II became queen, 5,425 men were in court on such charges. From the safer moment of 1970, the barrister H Montgomery Hyde MP reflected on the trend. It was, he thought, an aspect of the post-war crime wave, noting, 'It is easier and incidentally safer and less troublesome to catch a homosexual than a burglar.' Most heroes of detective shows are not criminals themselves. Gabriel Book can never be quite sure that his offence will not be the next one to be investigated. As we follow him through London, from case to case, from corpse to corpse, we will have cause to remember it. Bookish airs on Wednesday 16 July on U&Alibi tie-in novel Bookish by Matthew Sweet is published by Quercus on July 17
Times
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Mark Gatiss: Don't call my new detective drama ‘cosy crime'
A few years ago Mark Gatiss wrote a foreword to a book about Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot. 'What is required is order,' he began. 'Order is paramount. Order is a good and beautiful thing.' Now Gatiss, the television polymath once known as the tallest of the League of Gentlemen, has written for TV a fictional detective of his own in his new series Bookish. Gabriel Book, the eccentric but brilliant sleuth whom he also plays, is an erudite London bookseller who in the best sense helps the local police with their inquiries. Book has a deeply idiosyncratic idea of order and shelves the volumes in his shop neither by author name nor subject but according to a series of mental connections explicable only to himself. Book's shop was inspired by a bookshop Gatiss visited more than a dozen years ago in Cecil Court in West End of London while searching for a portrait of Oliver Cromwell (he was playing Charles I at the Hampstead Theatre). 'It was absolutely barmy, ceiling-high with pictures and books and run by a very eccentric lady. I said, 'Do you have a picture of Oliver Cromwell?' She said, 'Shhh! Five minutes,' and disappeared into the bowels of the shop and finally came back with it. It was a mind palace moment. And I took that away.' Gatiss in Sherlock in 2016 with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman TODD ANTONY/HARTSWOOD FILMS/BBC 'Mind palace' is a phrase bequeathed by Gatiss and Steven Moffat's Sherlock, in sad limbo since 2017. 'We always said about Baker Street,' recalls Gatiss, who is eating a lunchtime fish curry with me in a Soho restaurant, 'it should be very cluttered, but not a mess, actually a place you want to spend time, and I said exactly the same thing about Book's bookshop.' I say that I imagine Gatiss's north London home, which he shares with his husband, the actor and writer Ian Hallard, looks a bit similar. 'My own house is unfortunately a lot messier. It's a mess. Both my partner and I are utterly, terribly untidy. I said yesterday, 'I'm going to grab this house by the scruff of its neck.' But it doesn't seem to happen.' But Bookish is less about where than when. It is set, rather novelly, in 1946. 'It's very underexamined, Attlee's Britain. We're obsessed with the war, but the postwar period is usually just brushed over. It's such a strange time. There was optimism, but people's lives were absolutely upside down. Lots of opportunity. Lots of disappointment. A lot of lying. A lot of people coming back and reinventing themselves totally.' And although the Labour government was trying to build a new Jerusalem, it was not one in which gay men would be free. So Book, who is gay and in a loving 'lavender' marriage with a childhood friend called Trottie (played by Polly Walker), is a man of high status whose reputation could at any time be smashed if a policeman's torch shone on one of his foggy assignations. • Mark Gatiss and Russell T Davies on how to save TV 'A big plank of the idea of the series was about this world being full of opportunities but also extremely dangerous, and it's easy for us to forget — maybe less so because it's becoming increasingly dangerous again. But one foot wrong! Marriages of convenience, presenting this front to the world, were very common,' Gatiss says, citing the examples of the film stars Charles Laughton and Nils Asther ('the male Greta Garbo'). 'It's Gielgud-inflected, of course, because it is exactly what happened to him,' he adds. Gatiss won an Olivier award for his portrayal of the actor at the National Theatre (and in the West End) in Jack Thorne's The Motive and the Cue in 2024. In the play John Gielgud, who was prosecuted in 1953 for 'importuning', hires a rent boy, but not to have sex with him: 'He just wanted to do something reckless.' Of the recent Supreme Court ruling on the legal status of trans people, he says society has been 'obsessing about bathrooms when 300 miles from here people are still being flung off buildings for being gay'. Would he call Bookish cosy crime, I ask — cosy crime being TV's unlikely hot new genre. 'I do think it's a slightly pejorative term because it implies that it goes down inoffensively like baby food. I don't think it has to be like that. I totally get it: I once said I thought I was put on the Earth to make things that I would like to watch on a bank holiday Monday. That's my favourite feeling. But I don't think it has to be bland or unchallenging. I think it has to be about something.' Last year David Mitchell gave an interview to The Times about his cosy crime series Ludwig in which he said television should adopt a bowdlerised approach in which 'dead kids' in crime dramas were replaced by dead old colonels so that audiences' emotions would not be exploited. 'However, that's to be pejorative about that kind of strand, which is also extremely popular,' Gatiss says. 'But I do think the vogue for — for want of a better word — 'cosy crime' is probably a reaction against that. Some of it is sort of torture porn. Some of it is so nasty.' Gatiss and his co-creators Steve Pemberton, Reece Shearsmith and Jeremy Dyson were pioneers, of course, of uncosy comedy. In The League of Gentlemen, which aired on BBC2 between 1999 and 2002, an epidemic of nosebleeds killed scores in the fictional northern town of Royston Vasey, its butcher sold human remains, and the weirdo couple who ran the local shop for local people were attacked by a mob. The sketch show/sitcom was revived for a series of Christmas specials in 2017 and then a tour, but Gatiss has no wish to return to it. 'I'm 60 next year,' he says. 'I don't want to feel I'm trapped in some sort of Nineties band reunion.' (This will be blow for Pemberton and Shearsmith who told The Times in April they would both be up for another tour). In The League of Gentlemen with Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith in 2017 JAMES STACK/BBC Bookish proceeds by means of a series of two-part mysteries, the second set in the film world where murderous paranoia and ill will reign. Last year the final episode of Pemberton and Shearsmith's Inside No 9, in which Gatiss appeared, similarly depicted an actorly bitch-fest at a wrap party. Is that what showbiz is like — or just a lazy cliché? 'Oh, it's a lazy cliché!' he jokes. 'It depends on the production. I'm glad to say Bookish was a very happy set. Yes, it's a cliché, but there's a lot of truth in there. It's just about handling fragile egos sometimes. I think one thing that is absolutely permanent is the fear of replacement: 'Is my star waning? Who's this coming up on the inside track?'' So what was it like among the League of Gentlemen, I ask the one member of the league who graduated not only to the National Theatre but Hollywood. Was there rivalry? 'I know it's boring, but really not. We've never fallen out. We're still very good friends. We got back together this time last year. We had an anniversary lunch at the Ivy because it was 25 years since the first episode. And it always feels a bit to me like the Magnificent Seven. There's something lovely about 'here we all are'. It's just delightful to see them. And you pick up where you left off, which is the definition of a great friendship.' • Mark Gatiss: 'I went interrailing with friends. Within two days we'd all fallen out' Gatiss has acted in two Mission: Impossible films, including the latest, The Final Reckoning. In the first instalment he found himself on set with the British actress Indira Varma, and says they clung to each other before they discovered all the American actors around them were also 'shitting themselves'. He adds: 'But Christopher McQuarrie, the director, and Tom Cruise could not be more friendly and relaxed. So within a couple of days we were all having a great time.' Gatiss is such charming and amusing company, it always takes me aback how gloomy he is about the greater picture. The British film industry is in decline, he says, citing a Disney executive who reportedly said 'streaming is dead.' Budgets are down. AI looms. People are leaving for other careers. 'It's wonderful to be working, but the current environment is so scary, not just because of AI, but because the state of the industry is parlous.' I ask about the future of Doctor Who, which he has been a fan of since childhood and has written for and acted in. He points out that the Russell T Davies revival is two decades' old. 'I think genuinely, if Doctor Who doesn't come back, having come back before, it has now properly become an imperishable TV icon. Maybe it just needs another rest.' As for politics, this Labour supporter is very worried about the rise of Nigel Farage, whom he describes in terms that would likely be actionable. 'The implosion of the Tory party is incredible. Genuinely, you can't imagine these things could ever happen in your lifetime. Now we need to make sure the Tory party is resurrected. That's the only bulwark against [Reform UK] because it's moderate conservatism.' Bookish's Archangel Lane is a world that, although disordered by murders, makes sense once Book has worked out who committed them and why. This is the mechanism of most whodunnits, yet I am still puzzled how anyone writes one. Does Gatiss, for instance, start with the cue — the dead body — or the motive of the murderer? It is not a simple answer. Yes, you can work backwards, but you can also change your mind about who the murderer is and reapportion motives. With Connor Finch in Bookish TOON AERTS/UKTV 'What you're trying to do always is play fair with the audience. You plant clues, but if they're too obscure, they feel cheated. If they're too obvious, they just go, 'It's them.' That seems like an 'obviously' thing to say, but it's so true.' I ask whether he changed the identity of a murderer in the first season of Bookish (a second begins shooting soon, again in Belgium). He did. But, I say, that would be like changing one side of a Rubik's Cube. Suddenly all the other sides would be out of place. • Read more TV reviews, guides about what to watch and interviews 'My comparison always is Jenga. I did something in series two where I removed a character. I thought, 'Oh, that's an easy fix.' And then I realised I had pulled a Jenga piece out and the whole thing just went down.' He may be untidy at home, but he must have looked in despair upon the resulting chaos. For an artist like Gatiss, as for a detective like Poirot, order is paramount. Bookish starts on July 16 on U&alibi Love TV? Discover the best shows on Netflix, the best Prime Video TV shows, the best Disney+ shows , the best Apple TV+ shows, the best shows on BBC iPlayer , the best shows on Sky and Now, the best shows on ITVX, the best shows on Channel 4 streaming, the best shows on Paramount+ and our favourite hidden gem TV shows. Don't forget to check our comprehensive TV guide for the latest listings
