Kate Whiting discovers how Lee Ingleby and Inspector George Gently star, Martin Shaw, find time to laugh while battling North-East crime.

LEE Ingleby, who plays Sixties copper John Bacchus in North-East set Inspector George Gently, admits he and co-star Martin Shaw often end up in fits of laughter, despite the subject matter being hardedged crime-fighting.

“It’s that old thing of going ‘what am I doing?’. I’m chasing around a field after an imaginary thief, going ‘stop in the name of the law!’” explains Ingleby Lancashire-born Ingleby is back playing the unruly Detective Sergeant Bacchus, one half of a classic crime-fighting partnership with Chief Inspector Gently (Shaw), for four featurelength episodes.

The pair were brought to life from Alan Hunter’s Inspector Gently novels for the first time in 2007 when Gently postponed retirement to track down his wife’s killer with his new sidekick Bacchus.

This time the duo tackle some equally grim cases involving child abuse at a children’s home, prostitution and rape and racism.

Ingleby, 33, admits the children’s home episode is “very dark”, as well as being quite topical.

“It has reflections of the case that was in Jersey. It’s an unfolding piece where there’s more to it than it first seems.”

For a child of the Seventies, Ingleby says he initially found it quite hard portraying someone living before he was born. But it was more the attitude to policing and punishment at the time he found tough to understand.

“People would get hanged as a punishment back then, that was the threat. They didn’t do things like taping interviews, it was all written. So if a solicitor or representative wasn’t involved, you could almost write whatever you wanted.”

Comparisons have inevitably been drawn between Inspector Gently and the BBC’s other hit retro-cop show Life On Mars, in which Ingleby played John Simm’s father.

“Bacchus is the Gene Hunt character I suppose, but without being that small-minded. I think Gently sees the potential within him and tries to mould him to be a better policeman,” he says.

“It’s not just as simple as there’s the main guy and his sidekick. They’ve got different methods and different backgrounds, but I suppose Gently’s the more modern copper in a way. With him it’s more a case of ‘we’ll do this properly and by the book’, whereas I think Bacchus is more inclined to think ‘well, if we’re in the right ballpark...”’ In one episode, Gently and Bacchus take part in a boxing competition to raise money for the police widow’s fund.

“Martin plays a guy who used to box in the army, so he had to look as if he knew what he was doing, whereas I didn’t have to,” explains Ingleby.

“I just had to turn up on the day and do it. I’ve had no boxing experience, which is hard to believe I know,” he jokes.

Ingleby trained at the prestigious LAMDA drama school after his schoolteacher put the acting idea “in his head”.

The actor is perhaps best known for his role as Stan Shunpike in the movie Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban and as Mole in the 2006 TV adaptation of The Wind In The Willows.

Despite his credentials, he readily admits he was nervous about acting alongside Judge John Deed star Martin Shaw.

“When I first got the job, I thought I wouldn’t know what to do or say to him. But it was completely the opposite, we just clicked straight away and it was like we’re wo old mates.

“I think I was pleasantly surprised that he’s just like you and me,” he continues.

It’s lucky the pair get on well, because filming on the show takes place over two-month stretches in Dublin, which stands in for Northumberland.

“It was weird the first time we filmed there, because I’m doing a Durham accent – and I was surrounded by a crew of Dubliners and a Welsh director. But I love it, it’s a great place to work.”

Ingleby will be returning to the Sixties – and the silver screen – in comedy Hippie Hippie Shake, due out later this year, which is based on the memoir by Richard Neville, the editor of controversial hippy magazine Oz.

Can Ingleby explain the current obsession with the Sixties?

“I think because it was so different, we can barely believe what it was like. It feels alien and yet it was only relatively recently.

“They were exciting times, things were changing, the music, everything. That’s why people bang on about it I suppose, because it was such a great time to grow up.”

■ Inspector George Gently, BBC1, Sunday, 8.30pm