TheGuardian.com – 15th October, 2015

Writer tells of organisation of monsters featured in his Sunday evening ITV series based on Robert Louis Stevenson novel.

Charlie Higson: ‘Each generation we create our own new monsters and our own new threats.’ Photograph: Felix Clay for the Guardian

Charlie Higson says his new Sunday evening ITV series, Jekyll and Hyde, will be “Downton Abbey with monsters”.

Downton Abbey will conclude after six series when the Christmas special airs in December, leaving a hole in the Sunday evening schedule.

Higson’s Jekyll and Hyde is a retelling of the Victorian Robert Louis Stevenson novel – but traces the fate of Jekyll’s grandson in the 1930s. Robert Jekyll (Tom Bateman), having been raised by foster parents in Ceylon, is called to London, where he finds out more about his lineage and the monster who lurks inside him: Hyde.

Two shadowy organisations are in pursuit: Tenebrae, an organisation of monsters, and MIO (Military Intelligence Other), a super-secret service. It turns out the world is stalked by monsters of every variety – and MIO, led by Sir Roger Bulstrode (Richard E Grant) is tasked with suppressing the monsters and keeping them under wraps.

Novelist and screenwriter Higson, 57, said: “We’re really hoping this is going to be like Downton. It’s going to be Downton Abbey with monsters. We’re set in the 30s, it’s like a classic traditional period drama, and of course ITV has done all the Marples and the Poirots in that era. But they haven’t done them with men with giant lobster claws, and I think it’s about time.

“It certainly would have livened Downton up a bit. It’s very popular, I’m not dissing Downton, but I’d have watched more of it if it had a guy with a giant lobster claw turning up and smashing everything to pieces.”

Higson explained that the idea of MIO was partly inspired by current affairs.

He said: “In some ways I was I suppose channelling the ideas of all the stuff that [Edward] Snowden exposed, the idea that governments do all this stuff on our behalf. We do these terrible things for you. We get rid of these terrorists and we send them abroad to be killed – and don’t worry because we’re doing it for you. We’re doing it to protect society.

“So that was my idea of MIO, that in order to protect us and for us not to get scared, they will deal with all the nasty things, and they will do it quite ruthlessly … My MIO is very much like a modern government. Their job is to get rid of in secret all these things they think they need to get rid of.”

Pointing to the idea of the monster within, he said: “That’s a really strong idea, and that’s a very contemporary idea – the idea that monsters aren’t things from elsewhere, they’re not creatures from another planet, they are us. They are what’s inside us … Each generation we create our own new monsters and our own new threats.”