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David Morrissey plays landowner Robert Carne, a man on the brink of financial disaster and with love far from his mind when Sarah Burton returns to Yorkshire in Andrew Davies' new three-part drama serial South Riding for ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ One.

"Robert Carne is a gentleman farmer; a middle-class landowner who is not averse to rolling up his sleeves and mucking in," says David Morrissey.

"Carne is under pressure; his world is slipping away from him because he is in great financial difficulty trying to bring up his daughter in a manner she is accustomed to.

"He married above his station, to Muriel, Lord Sedgmire's daughter. But he never felt comfortable in her world. Nevertheless, now he finds himself as a single parent he is trying to cling on to a sort of affectation of a life that he once had, but it's crumbling away in front of him."

The 46-year-old actor, producer and director, who featured in numerous television and film productions including The Deal, Five Days, Blackpool, State Of Play and Captain Corelli's Mandolin, explains why Carne's first meeting with Sarah Burton (played by Anna Maxwell Martin) gets off to a bad start.

"Carne is part of the local council and they decide to advertise the post of a new Headmistress for the local girls' school. He takes his council duties seriously, although the appointment of a new Headmistress he feels is not terribly important!

"Sarah Burton has very strong views about the education of women and how one should be educating the girls to be a different kind of woman in the future. As a traditionalist he is slightly against that, and she therefore rubs him up the wrong way!"

Sarah Burton may not have made a great first impression on Robert Carne, but Anna Maxwell Martin certainly did.

David continues: "Anna is someone I have been a fan of for such a long time. I thought Bleak House was a brilliant piece of work. I have been aware of her but our paths have never crossed, so when I knew Anna was doing South Riding and it was Andrew's [Davies] scripts, it was a no-brainer for me.

"I think Anna gives a wonderfully nuanced performance. She really has the drive, commitment and the ambition that character needs.

"Sarah Burton is somebody who is championing the cause of these girls, but when it comes to her personal life, there is this great confusion about who she is. I think Anna plays that brilliantly. I was in awe of her before, but watching her in this she is certainly one of my top actresses."

The RADA-trained actor explains why novelist Winifred Holtby, who wrote South Riding just before her death 75 years ago at the age of only 37, is such a great loss.

"To my shame I didn't know the novel before I was sent the scripts," admits David. "I thought it was a great story, which then led me to the novel. As a writer, Winifred Holtby was at the top of her game when she wrote South Riding. The tragedy is she died very soon afterwards so a great literary talent was lost to us. We can only speculate about what she might have gone on to write, but I think she may have been one of our great British novelists.

"Andrew has created the world brilliantly, he obviously had to concentrate on some characters more than others, and had to cut whole storylines; but what Andrew has done is succinctly, wittily and movingly paint the world Winifred Holtby had in the book; it's there for a television audience to enjoy.

"What's great about South Riding is it's not the world of chinking crystals and sparkling chandeliers. It's not a rarefied place to be. It's a very real place about people facing very real crises in their lives," says the Liverpool-born actor.

"What's relevant to a modern audience is that it is set in a time when there is great economic hardship. There are cuts hitting people left, right and centre. The banks are closing and calling in debts. The local council is trying to spend their way out of that by creating better conditions for working people by putting them into proper housing. Other people have ulterior motives for doing that, so what you see is the murky world of the dealings of local councils.

"People like Carne are resistant to any sort of change because they believe this is not a time to spend, it's a time to be hunkering down and getting through the next couple of years. I think those debates are very much front page news for us at the moment, particularly when it comes to education, it's about the best way to educate our children; it's about the haves and the have-nots.

"The Yorkshire landscapes and locations where the novel is set are the perfect surroundings for the three-part drama," explains the father of three whose directorial credits include Sweet Revenge and Passer By for the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ and the feature film Don't Worry About Me.

"We found some great places like Sunk Island which is an amazing landscape. We also used some great public buildings like Morley Town Hall. If you look at the paintings and photographs on the Town Hall walls, the characters from the novel are right there, even their names!

"Morley Town Hall is steeped in the history of the world we were in," recalls David. "One location in the story is the shanty town that people live in called The Shacks. Diarmuid Lawrence [director] and the design team have realised this location brilliantly.

"It is a completely unsanitised, disgusting camp on the cliff tops at the mercy of the elements. It embodies the terrible conditions that many people in pre-war Britain had to live in. It is these conditions and the education of the working class, especially young girls, that is at the heart of Winifred Holtby's novel.

"South Riding is a rollicking great story about unrequited love and social conscience. I hope the drama reintroduces the novel to the public's consciousness because it is a great neglected work.

"What is wonderful for a viewer is that they won't know where the story is going; it's not a classic that we all know and love. It will be absolutely fresh to most people and that's the joy of it."

So what's next on the horizon?

"I am starting rehearsals on Macbeth at the Liverpool Everyman Theatre. I start rehearsals at the end of March so I am prepping now, and then it's back to producing and starring in a new series of Thorne."