Holding — Graham Norton's debut novel to be a four-part series for ITV

Holding, Graham Norton’s debut novel, is to be a four-part series for ITV directed by Kathy Burke

ITV has commissioned a four part adaptation based upon Graham Norton’s funny and tenderly perceptive debut novel, Holding, to be filmed on location in Ireland.

The series will be directed by Kathy Burke, written by Dominic Treadwell-Collins and Karen Cogan and produced by Happy Prince, part of ITV Studios, and Martina Niland for Port Pictures, in association with Screen Ireland.

Olivier award winning actor, Conleth Hill (Game of Thrones, Dublin Murders, Vienna Blood) will take the leading role of local police officer, Sergeant PJ Collins, a gentle mountain of a man, who hides from people and fills his days with comfort food and half-hearted police work. When the body of long-lost local legend Tommy Burke is discovered, PJ is called to solve a serious crime for the first time in his career. PJ finally has to connect with the village he has tried hard to avoid.

The press release describes it as follows:

A story of love, secrets and loss, Holding, is a darkly comic tale which shrewdly observes the lives of its characters, each with frailties, complexities and pasts they’d rather keep hidden. The story is a murder mystery laced with dark comedy and centred around the minutiae of rural Irish life.

The book’s description gives a different angle:

Duneen is a quiet place, far enough from the big towns to have kept its own rhythms. Its residents include castdown policeman PJ who lives a lonely, uneventful life punctuated only by the next meal – until now; the beautiful and mysterious family of three spinster sisters each with their own secrets and sorrows; and of course, the town’s gossip who think she knows the answers. When a grim discovery is made on a building site up by the old school, it becomes the catalyst for long buried secrets and rivalries to come to light and this silent, once innocent and repressed-seeming town is revealed to have a much darker, hungrier undertow.

Filming takes place this summer across Ireland. You can read more in the ITV announcement.