Broadchurch creator uses Dorset for first novel

The first episode of Chris Chibnall’s Broadchurch was first shown to Dorset residents at Bridport Arts Centre before it aired on ITV in 2013.

“I thought: ‘oh, if everybody hates this I am going to get driven out of town and I really like living here.’ Luckily, that didn’t come to be,” he said.

Three series later and having been Doctor Who’s showrunner between 2017 and 2022, Chibnall has used an imagined Dorset as the backdrop for his debut novel, Death at the White Hart.

“A landlord is discovered murdered, tied to a chair in the middle of the A35 at 02:00 and he’s got deer antlers strapped to his head. The question is who did it and why?” Chibnall said.

He told BBC Radio Solent at West Bay that he still takes inspiration from his adopted county.

“The first few years I was living down here, doing that drive between Dorchester and Bridport or Dorchester and Lyme Regis, at that stretch of the A35, if you’re doing it at 23:00 or midnight, it’s so dark, it’s so deserted,” he said.

“It always took me back to Thomas Hardy novels when you think of the coach and horses that would drive along there and the mist and the fog that is along there.

“It’s incredibly atmospheric, it’s incredibly beautiful and terrifying at the same time. That’s the sort of atmosphere that I wanted to harness for the novel.”

Chibnall returned to Bridport Arts Centre on Monday to launch the novel, which ITV has already commissioned for a TV adaptation.

The BAFTA-award winning writer said it had always been “an amazingly supportive community”.

He added: “When Broadchurch was on, people would ask me whoever did it or could they be in it? Could I write a character like them? And I would have to say: ‘you know that would be a murder suspect, don’t you?'”

But he said writing a book meant he could “go into the characters’ heads a lot more” than he has been able to in his TV work.

“It’s so different. Having done TV, you’re part of a big operation, a big team,” Chibnall added.

“So if I want to set something in a pub, a location manager has to find that pub and a designer has to dress that pub and I need a cinematographer and a director.

“Whereas with the novel, I describe the pub – we’re there as you read it. You’ve got an image of that pub and also it gives me the chance to go into the characters’ heads a lot more.”