Cold cases are tackled in ITV’s ‘Unforgotten’

For anyone who has forgotten the previous runs, it follows London detectives, DCI Cassie Stuart (Nicola Walker) and DI Sunny Khan (Sanjeev Bhaskar) as they tackle cold cases involving murder and missing persons.

You shouldn’t feel too bad if you needed to have your memory jogged as it seems this series has also tested the actors’ powers of recall. That’s because filming began in 2020, only to be shut down by the pandemic four weeks away from completion – it was eventually finished in September and October.

Nicola Walker explains: “Through lockdown it was really strange because you are carrying this character around, all you’re thinking about is this storyline and realising a few weeks in that you have to let it all go, including the lines…

“But it meant when we came back, the one thing I needed was four weeks advance notice to learn the lines again – you can’t hold them in your head for that long. That’s what happened. I had to re-read scripts to get the story back in my head and get the lines back in. It took about three days and then it was back, which was a relief.”

However, it seems that may have inadvertently helped her to play Cassie, who is intending to retire from the force for her own wellbeing, only to have her plans put on hold when it turns out she isn’t entitled to her full pension.

Nicola, whose other credits include The Split and Last Tango in Halifax, says: “I am sure everyone feels this… you come back to a job and you think ‘I don’t know if I can still do this.’ It is a really strange feeling.

“And ironically that was fine for me because that is exactly where Cassie is this year, which struck me as rather funny. It was perfect for Cassie because she doesn’t know if she can do it anymore and on a very real level, I wasn’t sure that I could either. So, it worked in my favour rather than against me.”

Let’s hope Cassie finds her feet again soon as well, as she is going to be dealing with a tough case.

It begins when a dismembered body is found in a North London scrapyard. Thanks to a distinctive tattoo, the team, led by Sunny, identify the victim as Matthew Walsh, who went missing 30 years earlier. They also discover that the body had been frozen and was transported to the scrapyard in a freezer purchased by the recently deceased Robert Fogerty, who has a drink-driving conviction from March 30, 1990 – the night Matthew disappeared.

There were also four other passengers in the car, and we are introduced to a quartet of people who could be connected to the case. In the Peak District, there’s therapist Fiona Grayson (Liz White), in Cambridge, high flying career woman Elizabeth Baildon (Susan Lynch), in Rochester, businessman Dean Barton (Andy Nyman) and in Southall, expectant father Ram Sidhu (Phaldut Sharma).