Acting
Peak Practice is a British drama series about a GP surgery in Cardale — a small fictional town in the Derbyshire Peak District — and the doctors who worked there. It ran on ITV from 10 May 1993 to 30 January 2002 and was one of their most successful series at the time. It originally starred Kevin Whately as Dr Jack Kerruish, Amanda Burton as Dr Beth Glover and Simon Shepherd as Dr Will Preston, though the roster of doctors would change many times over the course of the series. Cardale was based on the Staffordshire village of Longnor for the final series, but was previously based in the Derbyshire village of Crich, although certain scenes were filmed at other nearby Derbyshire towns and villages, most notably Matlock, Belper and Ashover.
Non Compos Mentis (Not of Sound Mind) is the chilling story of disturbed office worker Rob (Chris Brooklyn) who lives alone in semi-darkness in a house he has insulated against the realities of the outside world by covering all the windows in newspaper. Unable to form a relationship on a 'normal' level, Rob instead inhabits a fantasy world of his own creation, fuelled by his isolation and prodigious appetite for pornography. Things become a little more 'real' for Rob when he meets Michelle (Biba Lille West), the girl of his dreams. However, all is not as it seems, and the dream becomes a nightmare when Michelle turns out to be the catalyst that sends Rob on a downward spiral of lust, murder and extreme sexual deviance.
Bearing many similarities to Albert Camus' 1946 existentialist text L'Etranger (The Outsider), The Darkest Hour is a powerful portrait of contemporary urban angst, isolation and unrequited love. Pat leads an apparently ordinary life as an attendant in a notorious public toilet where the majority of the clientele are either involved in drug deals or cottaging. The only light in his otherwise solitary life is Kim, a girl he is infatuated with, who works in a local cafe he frequents. When he is 'provoked' into committing an act of extreme violence, Pat's subsequent unorthodox reaction to his crime leads inevitably to his life changing forever.
