DEFINITION August 2019

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W ild Bill is ITV’s new drama, which stars Rob Lowe as the new chief constable of the East Lincolnshire Police. Yes, you read that correctly. He plays Bill Hixon, a former high-flying Miami cop, who’s just moved to the UK with his 14-year-old daughter for reasons we, the viewers, don’t initially know. The series opens with Lowe in a smart tux and battered Volvo as he chases a carful of villains across a cabbage field. They escape, while he lingers to throw cabbages and yell at the sky. It then cuts to one week earlier where we find out how he got there: a double entendre for viewers at home also wanting to know how the Emmy award- winning West Wing actor ended up on a British TV production. However, displacing Lowe from America and putting him in Brexit Britain, and specifically in Boston, Lincolnshire, allowed the series writers to tell stories

BELOW DOP Baz Irvine on-set. To capture the location’s moodiness, he used a ‘heightened realism’ style

that were more left field and unexpected. You see, Boston is a socially complex part of the UK; it had the highest Leave vote in 2016 and has the highest murder rate per capita. Historically, it also has the largest immigrant population, because of its vegetable picking opportunities. These are all facts that are disclosed in the first episode, by the way – we’re not that knowledgeable about the second largest county in the UK (another fact). Second-block DOP, Baz Irvine ISC tells us: “You have to buy into the idea that Rob Lowe’s character was brought to this place as a policeman who needed to get control of these social issues. I think in one form or another, this story has been around for a while, but the scriptwriters, Dudi Appleton and Jim Keeble, have cleverly pushed it towards Boston to give it a Brexit backdrop. Otherwise, it could’ve just gone into a whimsy ‘Rob Lowe heads east’ type drama.”

For the look of Wild Bill, FX’s Fargo was referenced, combining the real and personal with surrealism

IMAGES West Wing actor Rob Lowe waking up in Lincolnshire with the backdrop of Brexit Britain, all captured with Sony’s Venice camera

DEF I N I T ION | AUGUST 20 1 9 27

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