Dalgliesh: Lurgan's Brownlow House features in new series of Channel 5 crime drama
A TV producer from Lurgan said she is “delighted” that her hometown’s landmark building Brownlow House will feature in the new series of hit crime drama Dalgliesh which starts this week.
Leon McGeown-Fee has made hundreds of hours of factual and scripted television for local and international broadcast, including top shows like Hope Street and London Kills.
It rarely happens though, that a view she grew up with ends up chosen as a location shoot.
"I am from the Freecrow area of Lurgan. Growing up in Brownlow Terrace, lots of my family lived between there and Kilmaine Street where my grandparents lived,” said Leon.
"It was a vibrant community that featured Lurgan Castle / Brownlow House as a backdrop. Back then the area was full of young families, lots of children and everyone played outside.”
It turned out that the imposing building which had been in Leon’s sightline as a child would make a perfect backdrop for the new Dalgliesh series which sees the adaption of another three novels from PD James’ international best-selling murder mysteries.
When the location scouts for the new series began looking around for potential locations for the new series, a variety of sites in Northern Ireland were identified.
"We needed a gothic and imposing building to use as an the exterior for the monastery and school St Anselm's,” explained Leon.
“I was delighted when the location manager suggested Brownlow House as the exterior and luckily we found a building in Belfast that worked as the interior of a boarding school in 1979.”
Filming took place at Brownlow House over two days in March.
In the new series, lead actor Bertie Carvel takes up the role of the uniquely enigmatic detective, Chief Inspector Adam Dalgliesh, for all six new episodes.
Viewers meet Commander Dalgliesh on the cusp of Thatcher’s rise to power, as he is called to investigate three highly sensitive murder cases, being told over two, hour-long episodes.
In Death in Holy Orders, Dalgliesh travels to a remote seminary overlooking a windswept lake, where a body has been found gruesomely murdered. Nearly everyone in the seminary has reason to resent the victim, and Dalgliesh and DS Tarrant must unpick a complicated set of motives to find their killer.
In Cover Her Face, Dalgliesh investigates a murder in the Essex home of the Mehtas, a staggeringly wealthy family with connections to the British government. With the help of local detective Clive Roscoe, Dalgliesh builds a picture of events in the weeks leading to the crime, confronting a blanket of secrecy among his guarded suspects.
In Devices and Desires, Dalgliesh is sent on an urgent mission to investigate a terrorist plot against a nuclear power station on the Kent coast. He is soon drawn into a complex and highly charged hunt for a serial killer, working once more alongside former colleague Kate Miskin, now an acting DCI.
Dalgliesh is produced by New Pictures for Acorn TV and Channel 5 in association with All3Media International. The new series begins on Thursday, December 5 at 9pm.