www.channel4sales.com
May 2008

Channel 4’s drama slate continues to expand in 2008 with an ambitious new four-part serial due to start filming this month.

Created and written by Martine Brant and BAFTA winning playwright Peter Flannery, The Devil’s Whore tells the epic story of the English Civil War through the eyes of Angelica Fanshawe, a young aristocratic woman who is drawn to the anti-monarchist cause at a time when England dared to execute its King and search for an alternative means of government.

The compelling four-part serial will star an impressive cast headed up by newcomer Andrea Riseborough as Fanshawe. Riseborough’s acclaimed stage roles include The Pain and the Itch at the Royal Court and Citizenship at The National Theatre. She will shortly appear as the young Margaret Thatcher in the forthcoming BBC 4 drama The Long Walk to Finchley as well as the female lead in a Film4 short film, Love Me More; the directorial debut of artist Sam Taylor Wood, which will premier at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

John Simm (Life on Mars) plays anti-hero Edward Sexby, alongside Dominic West (The Wire), Michael Fassbender (Hex) and Tom Goodman-Hill (Gideon’s Daughter, Spamalot) as the three leaders of the Revolution; Cromwell, Rainsborough, and Lilburne. Peter Capaldi (The Thick of It) stars as King Charles I, with Maxine Peake (Shameless, See No Evil) as Elizabeth Lilburne.

One of British television’s most distinguished voices, Peter Flannery – who won acclaim for his BBC TV series Our Friends in the North – has worked with Martine Brant to create The Devil’s Whore; a blend of fact and fiction which illuminates what is, in screen terms, a surprisingly neglected era in English history. We meet Angelica Fanshawe in the court of King Charles I, a spirited but unquestioning royalist, she marries her aristocratic cousin Harry (Ben Aldridge). But in the subsequent years we follow her brave journey, charting her passionate affairs of the heart and mind, from a position of innocence to that of painfully learned political and emotional awareness.

Peter Flannery says:
“The Devil’s Whore is certainly not intended as a history lesson. I have quite consciously taken liberties with known facts and personalities in order to construct a different kind of truth – the sort of truth Our Friends in the North told about post-war Britain, the sort of truth a documentary approach cannot reveal.”

Head of Channel 4 Drama, Liza Marshall says:
“It is a testament to Peter Flannery’s extraordinary scripts that this project has attracted some of the industry’s hottest talents; from director Marc Munden, fresh from the BAFTA winning success of The Mark of Cain, to a cast including rising star Andrea Riseborough and more familiar names John Simm and Dominic West. I am confident that this will be a big, bold highlight in Channel 4’s autumn season.”