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EXCLUSIVE: UK network Channel 4 has boarded a crime drama starring Katherine Kelly about a single mother who is blackmailed into smuggling drugs.
Filming on the six-part In Flight is underway, with Kelly (Mr Bates vs the Post Office, The Long Shadow) playing an air hostess who is forced to take desperate measures after her son is arrested. Alongside Channel 4, Prosieben has acquired rights to Germany, SBS for Australia and TVNZ for New Zealand. Fremantle has handling international distribution.
Mike Walden (Marcella, Whistable Pearl) and Adam Randall (Slow Horses, iBoy) are there writers and Chris Baugh (Wreck, Tin Star) is the director. Buccaneer Media is producing.
Kelly’s character, Jo Conran, is a single mother whose son is serving a 15-year sentence in a Bulgarian prison for a murder he swears not to have committed. When she approached by a gang who knows all about her situation, she is blackmailed into smuggling and forced into a world of corrupt cops and hired killers to keep her child alive.
Also cast as Stuart Martin as a key member of the cimrinal gang, Ashley Thomas as a customs officer at a major London airport, and Bronagh Waugh, Harry Cadby, Corinna Brown and Ambreen Razia.
Set across locations including London, Bangkok, Bulgaria and Istanbul, filming is taking place in Belfast, Northern Ireland, with funding support from Northern Ireland Screen.
Anna Burns, Tony Wood and Richard Tulk-Hart are the exec producers for Buccaneer, with Rebecca Dundon and Simon Judd doing the same for Fremantle alongside Walden, Randall and Baugh. Brendan Mullin is the producer and Gary Davy led casting.
“In Flight is our spin on the noir genre, a high stakes, stylish, romantic thriller with iconic characters and nerve shredding action,” said Walden and Randall in a statement. “Channel 4 is the perfect home for our story and we’re so excited to be collaborating with such a brilliant team. Jo is a character close to our hearts. She is an ordinary woman facing extraordinary odds. We can’t wait for audiences to meet her.”
Polly Scates, who acquired the show for Channel 4, said: “This unique crime drama will take our audience on a thrilling journey through terrifying worlds, but at the real heart of this story is just how far a parent will go to keep their child safe.”
Channel 4 has increasingly looked to international co-production models to fund its drama, with the likes of crime drama Patience brought into then network through a similar model earlier this year in part to offset rising costs of commissions.
“At a difficult time for the industry In Flight shows the power of bringing a number of partners together to make something happen, so a big thank you to SBS, TVNZ, ProSieben and Fremantle for also seeing the potential in these scripts at such an early stage,” said Buccaneer’s Tulk-Hart.
Dundon, Fremantle’s SVP of Scripted Content, said the series would be a “surprising, propulsive standout” as a “high stakes action crime thriller that combines the intensity of international drug smuggling with the emotional depth of a mother’s relentless quest to save her son.”
