Sorted

16 July, 2006 by The_Boss

BBC ONE Tuesday 18th July, 2006 9.00pm

Hugo Speer, Neil Dudgeon, Dean Lennox Kelly, Cal Macaninch, Will Mellor and Mark Womack star as six postmen - workmates and friends who share each other's lives – in Sorted, a new series for BBC ONE.

Tracy-Ann Oberman also joins the cast in her first major TV series since leaving EastEnders.

Set in Manchester and written by Danny Brocklehurst, Sorted lifts the lid on the complicated, funny and emotive lives of this motley gang; exposing their secrets, passions and fears and delving into their lives, loves, work, family and everything in between. But above all, it's about being mates.

Producer Steve Lightfoot (No Angels, Casualty) says: "The warmth, wit and camaraderie of these very ordinary blokes ensures they can see each other through whatever life throws at them. It's very real, with powerful, emotional storylines which will hook viewers in to their world.

"The sorting office is where the boys come together at the start of every day. They're a tight knit group, but with their shift finishing in the afternoon, there's plenty of time to see what they get up to away from the Post Office.

"There are storylines which run throughout the series but each episode focuses in on one of the six."

Sorted is the first six-part major series from writer Danny Brocklehurst, whose previous credits include Clocking Off, Shameless and The Stretford Wives.

Danny Brocklehurst explains: "What this was supposed to be was very much in that Clocking Off or The Lakes kind of vein of telling stories about people who actually – other than in soaps – don't make it onto television that often.

"It's about ordinary, working-class lives. I wanted to tell stories with dignity and humanity and truth about ordinary people, and even though the stories are not always life and death, they are really important to those characters.

"I think that there's not enough of that type of telly on these days," Danny continues. "People want to sit down at the end of the day and watch something that they see a bit of themselves in."

And he welcomed the chance to write a series predominantly about men. "It's been really refreshing because you can tap into that side of you that you understand – because obviously I am a man! I've never really written blokey blokes before in this kind of way.

"There are thousands of postmen in the UK they're part of everyone's lives. Since I started working on the series I notice them everywhere.

"I interviewed a lot of postmen just to try and get a flavour of the world and to try and really understand it and how it all works.

"I knew nothing about this before, even though I have an uncle who's a postman, but I got told some funny little stories about things that happened; one of which made it into the show - the battle of the radios in episode one. That's from real life."

Sorted was filmed in Stockport. The six-part series is directed by Iain B Macdonald (Bodies, Hotel Babylon) and Marc Jobst (Casualty, North Face). The executive producer is Sally Haynes.