‘We always knew we wanted to tell a story in our home town,” says Paul Clarkson, the co-creator of BBC Three’s new eight-part drama Red Rose, alongside his twin Michael. “We were asked: ‘What concepts do you have?’ And Michael went: ‘Something like Scream or The Ring, but set in Bolton.’”
The 33-year-old Clarksons’ new series rides the vertiginous contours of life in a northern English community – then takes that realism and jumps off to somewhere much darker. We are in the Greater Manchester town in the present day, where a group of teenagers who call themselves “the dickheads” are marking the end of their GCSEs by partying in the streets and on the nearby moors. As they celebrate and wonder what they’ll do next, one of them, Rochelle (Isis Hainsworth), receives a phishing text and downloads an app called Red Rose.
