TV pick: Safe House

Christopher Eccleston and Marsha Thomason in the TV series Safe House.

Set in the isolated wilderness of the Lake District, Safe House is a tense new British thriller in the vein of Broadchurch. Starring Christopher Eccleston and Marsha Thomason as a married couple - a former detective and a teacher - the plot hinges on their decision to turn their remote guest house into a police safe house when asked by an old colleague.

"The show was inspired by a casual anecdote," writer-creator Michael Crompton explains. "Across the UK there are safe houses managed by private individuals and used by different agencies such as the police, intelligence and security services, the armed forces, multinational businesses. And I hadn't seen a safe house in a drama run by 'normal people' and was gripped the idea of using this precinct in a fresh way to create a tense and thrilling crime drama that wasn't straight police procedure."

The first people who come to stay at the safe house are the Blackwell family, in fear of their lives after they are violently attacked by someone who claims to know them. Initially no one knows why the family have been targeted and while the police hunt the man at large, Eccleston's character Robert conducts an more subtle investigation into the family members under his protection at the safe house.

But the whole arrangement brings various buried issues to the surface for Robert and Katy as they grow closer to the family's children - the trauma of a terrifying night 18 months before, when Robert was protecting a star witness and was shot and the witness killed.

"Robert was a very serious career policeman with no time in his life for anything other than his job," explains Eccleston. "There was no wife or children. He was very driven. Then about six months before he was shot he met Katy, who basically changed his view of the world."

Their new life together has been derailed by this incident, and they're trying to get things back to a sense of normalcy when they agree to run the safe house, which may be the challenge he needs to work through his past.

"Being shot and so close to death, also rewitnessing the death of another human being who is under your care, not only is there personal humiliation, it's the brush with mortality that you either learn from or go under. I think Robert has had some form of breakdown and then some form of spiritual rebirth.

"He's essentially two different people. It's opened him up, made him aware of his own mortality. He's become much more reflective, perhaps more sensitive.

"But he crosses the line and forgets his responsibility in the pursuit of evidence. Once the policeman in him kicks in and there's a scent of the truth, all bets are off."

When: Sunday, 8.30pm
Where: TV3
What: Wet and windy UK thriller

- TimeOut