Liverpool TV producer Colin McKeown reflects on gripping Merseyside Detectives show ahead of his ‘Audience with’ event next week

It took him months to gain the trust of Merseyside Police and film the shocking but gripping documentary about two of the city’s most tragic murders.

And even though Merseyside Detectives has earned meteoric praise and secured the highest viewing figures of any programme streaming on Channel 4 in August this year, Liverpool film maker and producer Colin McKeown admits he has mixed feelings about the four-part series.

“When we finish any project, we have a wrap party,” he says. “But given the subject matter, we thought it would be disrespectful for anybody to be celebrating anything with Merseyside Detectives. 

“I was proud of the documentary and its sensitive handling, and I was in admiration of both families, particularly the mothers who appealed for the community to give the perpetrators up.

“My job was to make the best, honest documentary I could about my own city, and it clearly featured the good points – and the bad points. So my feelings are mixed.”

It took 20 years before Merseyside Police trusted a filmmaker to have anything like the access Huyton-born Colin and his team were given after a bad experience, he says, with a documentary called Blues and Twos ‘which mickey took both the city and it’s community’.

“It took me a whole 18 months to persuade both the outgoing Chief Constable Andy Cooke and the incoming Chief Constable Serena Kennedy to sign an exclusive access agreement, and we started the shoot not knowing what to expect. 

“We were many, many, months in following the serious crime squad when that very unfortunate week happened when we caught two murders on our lenses, both Ashley Dale and Olivia Pratt-Korbel.”

But he adds: “Am I of a mind that I’m glad I did it? The answer is yes, because I think I endeavoured to handle both the subject matter, the city and its community in the most honest way possible. 

“Am I surprised by its success? Not really, because it was a very passionate and compelling story, albeit of a tragic nature.”

With more than 50 years in the industry, Colin McKeown has produced comedy and light entertainment programmes, as well as creating film and TV drama alongside factual documentaries. His life and his work will be put under the spotlight in An Audience with Colin McKeown at Shakespeare North Playhouse on Wednesday, October 9, when the man awarded an MBE for his services to drama production and the community in Liverpool will be interviewed by presenter Pete Price.

“Very recently I was asked to do an inauguration speech at John Moores University as they offered me a professorship. Rather than do a lecture, I took the audience on a spin of my life, and I was approached afterwards by Shakespeare North to do a slightly bigger version of that,” he says.

“I undertook it because I want to endeavour to give people an awareness of the industry, and hopefully inspire some to take those very first steps as I did over 51 years ago.”

Colin started his career as a production trainee at Granada Studios, before teaming up with producer and screenwriter Phil Redmond to set up Brookside, which ran from 1982 until 2003. He went on to create and produce police drama series Liverpool 1 with Samantha Janus and Mark Womack, and then continued to produce acclaimed and awarding films, series and documentaries like Moving On, Care, Broken, Granite Harbour, Compulsion, and Anthony … and the list goes on.

Colin launched LA Productions based in Kirkdale in 2000 to ‘create a sustainable production and post-production facility in my home city’.

And while there is much talk about Liverpool becoming the Hollywood of the North in the future, he has been pioneering the way and doing much for the industry for decades: “And I will carry on doing it while I draw breath,” he declares.  “I think there are lots of different types of people in the world, but they really boil down to two camps, those who talk and those who DO. Thank God, I am of the latter and not the former.

“My ethos is to deliberately blur the edges of the scripted and non-scripted, to broaden the aspirations of film makers to encompass narrative that might be drawn from true life and fact, or maybe total fiction. Either/or, the responsibility is to fundamentally entertain people.”

That entertainment can, though, involve shouldering the weighty responsibility of hard-hitting real life dramas. Among Colin’s applauded credits is Anthony, written by Jimmy McGovern, which imagined the life Anthony Walker might have had had he not been murdered in an unprovoked attack near his home in Huyton when he was 18 years old.

Colin says: “When I’m portraying the stories of real people I feel total responsibility, and a total commitment for them to be honest and faithful, particularly when they’re about individuals I know personally.

“I’ve known Gee Walker for nearly 20 years. It was after knowing her that length of time she put her trust in me, and of course, I had the responsibility to reciprocate that.”

With such a successful body of work behind him, is there anything of which Colin is most proud?

“I think that question is analogist to any parent being asked who’s your favourite kid,” he says. “I’m proud of everything I do, otherwise I wouldn’t do it. 

“Sometimes you can be proud of the simplest of things. While at Brookside I did a small training exercise. We had no sound available to us, so we made a short silent film.

“It had no dialogue and we shot it all below knee level, and told a story with feet, and shoes, entitled ‘The New Shoes’. The irony was, because there was no dialogue, it was easily accessible by any country in the world and sold to 52 countries!

“But there’s something to be proud of in every project. They all accumulate to experience, and that experience begets more interest from those wanting to start in the industry.

“Enabling people to make their first steps is, overall, my proudest achievement.”

An Audience with Colin McKeown is at Shakespeare North Playhouse on Wednesday, October 9.

You can watch Merseyside Detectives on Channel 4 here.

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