Kirkham Jackson: Roman Road

(with Alan Davies and John Gordon Sinclair)

After he completed Five Boys, Jackson decided to give himself a short sabbatical. The plan was to have a break from writing fiction and to return to it six months or so later on. He had two ideas he wanted to work on - a feature-length screenplay which is still... cough... 'ongoing' and an idea for a tv series, called Roman Road.

Roundabout 1990 Jackson and an old friend from Lancashire (who, in order to protect his identity, shall be referred to here simply as 'John Eatough') decided to do the Wainwright coast-to-coast walk from St. Bees in the Lake District over to Robin Hood's Bay near Whitby. This proved to be surprisingly gruelling - a situation epitomized when they got lost in a blizzard on the top of some Lakeland mountain in their shorts and packamacs. Anyway, Jackson was convinced that this experience, combined with a character he'd known at Dartington would make useful ingredients in a tv series.

Jackson had begun to take an interest in the 'Roman Occupation' of Britain. He was of the opinion that a great many people in Britain hadn't quite grasped that the country had ever been invaded at all. (Invasion seems to be a bit of a bee in Jackson's bonnet, doesn't it?) So he started playing around with the idea of two men following a Roman road from Chichester to London, talking about their own shared history and the history of the land on which they walked.

Jackson wrote two or three half hour episodes, which were optioned by Zenith TV (a production company) and over the course of a couple of years these episodes were extended, rewritten and eventually offered to the channels who unanimously rejected them. ITV, however, asked if Jackson might consider reworking the idea for a single feature-length drama.

The programme was eventually commissioned in the summer of 2004, Alan Davies and John Gordon Sinclair were cast in the two main parts and, in direct opposition to the process which led up to it being commissioned, the film was shot, edited and broadcast within a matter of months.