Pioneering crime drama Silent Witness — the BBC’s longest continuous running drama series — wrapped up airing its 20th season in January, and fans are still eating it up. The cast are just too engaging to switch off.
Lead actors Liz Carr and David Caves, both forensic examiners on the show, are as hilariously in tune off-screen as they are on it. They banter over who should answer what question, and whether or not they’re sitting too close to one another during their interviews.
Carr and Caves jokingly crushed disposable cups that had Benedict Cumberbatch’s face on them at Liverpool’s BBC Showcase on February 20. This, while discussing the fact that not many shows have enjoyed the longevity of theirs.
“Especially not that one, certainly,” Caves said, choking a Sherlock cup with both hands. “Whatever that show is. We have to drink out of Sherlock cups. 20 years — 20 years! Really?”
“We want our own cups,” agreed a laughing Carr.
Far before Sherlock exploded onto the screen, Silent Witness became one of the first large-scale productions to bring forensic pathology crime-solving to TV. This was in 1996, four years before CSI: Crime Scene Investigation aired in America. (The X Files, which aired in 1993, featured forensic sciences but with a focus on the extraterrestrial rather than crime.)
Carr said their success came down to three things: the topicality of the show, the interesting characters and the dead bodies.
“I think the star of the show is the dead body. That’s where we get the answers from, that’s how we learn about the crime and what’s unfolded. The show kept really true to that way before other shows were doing that,” she said.
Caves, who in seriousness finds Sherlock to be a great show (Carr hasn’t seen it), said there are plenty of detective shows to go around. Though fans sometimes moan that certain scenes are unrealistic, there would be no show without the drama.
“You get people saying on Twitter, ‘They’d never do that! What are you doing mate? What are you doing mate? What are you running after him for?’” said Caves.
He and Carr imagined what a realistic show would look like — sending off samples and waiting around six months for the results to come back.
“There’d be no show,” exclaimed Carr. “Then it’s a documentary.”
For the most part, fans have had positive things to say, although Caves found himself next to a particularly oblivious girl watching the show on her iPad next to him on the tube.
“I look down and it was me [on her screen]. I thought, I wouldn’t normally, but I’ve got to say something,” he recalled.
“I tapped her on the shoulder and I said, ‘It’s a good show, that.’ She took her earphones out and went, ‘Sorry?’ I said, ‘It’s a good show, that.’ She said, ‘Yeah… I know,’ and put her earphones back in and carried on watching. I just got up and left. It was too beautiful a thing to say anything.”
*Silent Witness series 20 just wrapped airing in the UK. Series 19 will air on April 12 on BBC First in the Middle East.
