'Staggered': Belfast looked like certain parts of Brighton, says Showtrial Julia Ford

​He is interested in dramas that took a lot of opinions to be aired and expressed.

But after the success of series one of BBC One’s Showtrial — in association with ITV Studios which will also handle international distribution — the creator of the British legal drama, who also wrote Spooks, Party Animals, Outcasts and Cobra, was faced with a few big questions when thinking about how to approach the second series: what do we do, how do we take the show forward, and what’s the format we’re going to use?

It is why the second instalment of the anthology series became more centred around a distinct case with a completely different cast, including a new suspect, and new defence and prosecution lawyers, about a climate activist Marcus Calderwood, played by Barney Fishwick, who is left for dead after a violent hit and run.

He apparently uses his dying moments to identify his killer — who happens to be a cocky serving police officer called Pc Justin Mitchell, played by Michael Socha.

Showtrial also stars Adeel Akhtar, 44, as an anxious defence solicitor Sam Malik, who is notorious for winning hopeless causes, and Joe Dempsie, 37, also known as DI Miles Southgate, brought in from a neighbouring force to investigate and Leila Hassoun-Kenny, played by Nathalie Armin, a diligent CPS solicitor leading the case against the accused.

As the trial is dominated by cultural divisions and the truth becomes more difficult to establish, season two explores whether a fair trial is even possible as public outrage reaches a new high.

“It would be too much of a coincidence to have the same lawyers working on another emblematic case and that’s the premise of Showtrial.

“The case has to be big, it can’t just be an ordinary murder trial, or drug smuggling case, it has to be a big emblematic case with grit that takes the imagination of the country. It has to say something about the country in which we live,” says Richards.

“What happens if a big, emblematic climate activist gets murdered? That was the starting point, from then it fed into an idea of what if the victim had been the subject of stalking by a police officer.

“That then takes you into another whole area because obviously, the police have very much been under the microscope for a number of different reasons.

“I also wanted to look at the big topic of the day which is mental health. We are absolutely bombarded at the moment with information and demands.

“We are more aware of mental health but I wanted to put that in the context of a trial because here this question of ‘mad or bad’ has always been a very strong one.

“I wanted to explore those questions about free will versus responsibility.”

But Akhtar, who also starred in 2010 film Four Lions and 2024 Netflix hit series Fool Me Once, thinks that at the end of the day, Showtrial is about imperfect people living their lives, trying to do the best they can.

“Even the people that you go to for help, such as lawyers and the police, they are all humans with imperfections too. We have to look at those imperfections with charity and forgiveness, which is what Sam does. He looks at people, sees their imperfections and knows that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily bad or automatically guilty,” says Akhtar.

In any case, Richards believes the defence lawyer is always closer to the suspect and therefore to the real heart of the trial. So for him, dramatically, Malik (Akhtar) is the character at the heart of this Showtrial — “in some ways, he also operates as a kind of narrative voice,” Richards adds.

“He’s sceptical as his son laughs at him, he looks down on both sides of the culture war. He’s sceptical of cliches and ideologies, social media and a lot of the things we’re very familiar with these days. He doesn’t like the ‘easy answers’ of the internet, so to speak.

“Crucially, he is also in the grip of terrible anxiety and insomnia that relates to an earlier tragedy in his life. For me, what Sam expresses is that in a time when we are being told we should be aware of mental health, as we should be, he doesn’t agree that it defines a person.”

Culture wars have always existed. But they have become more prominent in the media and in political debate, where at one point, seemed like a suitable vehicle to resolve divisive cultural issues. So when director Julia Ford first opened the script and read ‘Man on a bike cycling from Lewes to Brighton’, she thought it was brilliant.

“We shot it in Belfast and I thought it was going to be a real challenge putting these places together. Our locations department, production designer Gillian Devenney, producer Ken Horn and I all got on a zoom and looked at images of places they’d been to see in Belfast — I was absolutely staggered by how many places look like certain parts of Brighton,” Ford says.

“In lots of ways this new instalment of Showtrial plays into the contemporary obsession with the culture wars and we felt that Brighton was a very recognisable backdrop for that conflict,” adds executive producer Simon Heath

“We’ve filmed a number of dramas in Northern Ireland in the past decade, including Line of Duty. What’s great is that areas of Northern Ireland double well for the south coast of England. Those locations were supplemented by second unit filming in and around Brighton itself.”

Socha really enjoyed filming the series in Belfast too.

“I had an absolute laugh filming Showtrial.

“Belfast is up there with my favourite cities, and I felt massively looked after during filming.

“Because our director Julia Ford comes from an acting background, she let me run riot with Justin, and I felt in real safe hands with her. I’ve got to say this is one of my favourite jobs I’ve done so far, and the cast that I worked with are top-notch,” says Socha.

“I’m massively grateful to have worked with Adeel so closely, and I got a lot of inspiration from him. Adeel is a class actor but he’s also a good laugh. He’s fun to work with, someone that you can feel no pressure with, and can really get to try new things with and riff off.”

l Showtrial comes to BBC One on Sunday, October 6