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."
