Top Coppers: Introducing a new wave of comedy talent

C: For pretty much all of the regular Top Coppers cast, it’s their first kind of big outing - except John Hollingworth, who actually has quite a good role in Poldark and has a significant amount of fans already!

One of the big surprising introductions is Donovan Blackwood as Chief. Donovan has been with us since we created a mini-series of Top Coppers in 2010. We put out an advert online, then he just came and auditioned. He’s a session soul singer and he’d not done much TV acting, except for a part in Casualty where he fell off a ladder and got covered in blue paint about 10 years ago. But he came and auditioned and just blew it away.

A: It’s like he was born to be the chief, you couldn’t find a better person. He just is the chief. In every episode we have a song, and most of them are sang by Donovan too. He’s got this amazing soulful, deep voice.

C: Then playing John Mahogany you’ve got Steen Raskopoulos who was nominated best newcomer at Edinburgh Fringe last year. And Mitch Rust is played by John Kearns, who won best newcomer at Edinburgh two years ago and last year he won the Fosters Edinburgh award.

John can play a very unusual character, and it was just I think quite fortuitous that we’d also written this really weird character where we were going: ‘Uh who do we get to play THIS?!’ John’s just got something different. 

C: For Mahogany, we probably went through maybe 50 to 60 auditions. It was tough because it’s probably the hardest character to play in the show. Mahogany has got to be the voice of the audience in a really surreal world. He’s our Father Ted.

A: He’s the closest to the audience, he’s the only one who can go ‘Um, what?’ you know, question what’s going on. But at the same time he’s ridiculous.

C: Yeah exactly, and that’s a hard part to play, there’s a lot of things to balance there. Steen did a chemistry audition with John and he was absolutely phenomenal. They had chemistry instantly but they met for the first time then in the room. 

A: And I think Gabby Best has done exactly the same with Helga. A lot of our friends think Helga is their favourite character, they just love her, even though she hardly says anything.

C: In an odd way, we’d written her character quite cold, obviously it’s a reference to Sarah Lund in The Killing and a lot of those sort of Scandinavian crime dramas in more recent years. But Gabby has such a natural warmth to her, that she’s made the character warm without losing any of her steeliness.

A: We’re also very lucky to have a fantastic cast and some really really good cameos in Top Coppers.

C: It was lovely to have Kayvan Novak back. And we got people from The Mighty Boosh, Simon Farnaby and Rich Fulcher. We seem to attract those Boosh kind of guys becausewhat the Boosh had of that kind of other-worldliness we have too. 

C: When we asked Alan Dale to play Mahogany’s father, he really took to it. He was filming a movie in South Africa at the time, so we just had to have him in the sound studio and recorded it all down the line.

The first time he called me I was on a beach with my girlfriend and we were climbing across some rocks when I got this call. So I answered it and started talking to him, and as we were talking she slipped and her foot went into this massive, deep puddle in the middle. So I was kind of like: ‘I’ll help you in a minute, I’m just on a call with Alan Dale…’ [laughs]. But she was somewhat starstruck that Jim Robinson from Neighbours was on the phone, so it was OK!

Cein McGillicuddy and Andy Kinnear co-created Top Coppers.

Top Coppers continues on Wednesday, 26 August at 10pm on BBC Three. Each episode will be available in BBC iPlayer for 30 days after broadcast on TV.

Comments made by writers on the BBC TV blog are their own opinions and not necessarily those of the BBC.