The world knows it as the English Lake District. To the working class of Britain's industrial north, it is simply the Lakes, a place of cheap boarding houses, coach trips, caravans, Kendal Mint Cake. Where fish is what comes with chips, not something you catch with rod and line. The first episode of Jimmy McGovern's four-part serial, starting tomorrow night on BBC1, is as dark as anything the Irish-Liverpudlian writer has ever done as he strips away the varnish from the romantic canvas of shimmering water and lonely fell. Forget Wordsworth and Coleridge. This is a place where "when men are men, sheep are nervous", an isolated community where violence and sex are the only way emotions can find expression.
The Lakes arrives with an impressive behind-the-camera pedigree. Written by Jimmy McGovern (1997 BAFTA for Hillsborough); directed by David Blair (BAFTA for Takin' Over The Asylum) and produced by Charles Pattinson (BAFTA for Our Friends In The North). In front of the camera, there are few familiar faces. A tactical decision, says Pattinson: "It doesn't carry the baggage of other shows." Once again, McGovern has drawn heavily on his own personal history. Of his previous work, Hearts And Minds was based on his years as an over-idealistic teacher in a Liverpool comprehensive; Fitz, the criminal psychologist in Cracker, shared McGovern's vices of drink, cigarettes and gambling; in Priest McGovern explored his love/hate relationship with Catholicism; and his left-wing politics and Liverpool/Irish identity were central to Brookside. And then there's sex.
All these elements come together in the crucible of the outwardly peaceful Lakeland valley where the story unfolds - a drama described by the production company as "a witty, hard-edged story of lust, deceit, Catholicism and gambling". For good measure, you can add McGovern's other obsessions of guilt and death. Like Danny Kavanagh, the barely-adult hero of The Lakes, played by the innocent and impish John Simm, Jimmy McGovern escaped unemployment in Liverpool when he was 18 by working as a kitchen porter in a Lakeland hotel. Like Danny he married a local girl in the face of considerable hostility. ("Scousers," he soon learns, are either "bone idle, all descended from the feckless Irish" or "bone idle, descended from bastard slave owners". ) Like Danny, McGovern gambled.
"I was married with three kids to support, which didn't stop me walking into a betting shop one day in the early 1970s with my £150 wages and losing the lot. It was the worst thing I ever did in all my years of gambling." He had started gambling aged six. "Back then, everyone in Liverpool gambled," he says. "There weren't betting shops but a man used to stand on the street corner on a Saturday and all the kids would rush up with scraps of paper to put bets on for themselves and their parents. I remember winning a fiver after a sixpence each-way double bet on two horses - that's how I became hooked. I didn't gamble to stand out. I did it to blend in.
"A lot of people in dead end jobs have no way to express their creativity, but they find self-esteem through gambling. It's a way of saying `I picked this horse and I was right'. I only stopped gambling when I became a student teacher and started writing. That filled my creative void."
Understanding any kind of addiction is difficult for outsiders. Victims of drink or drugs are familiar figures in the urban landscape, but the world of dogs and horses, of odds, of form, is unknown territory, hidden behind blacked-out high street windows. The Lakes probably gets as close to the central nerve of it as you can without first-hand experience.
Gambling is not only the fuse that ignites its central drama, it can be seen as the metaphor for pulses that seem only able to beat to the drum of illicit pleasure. The gamble that she won't get pregnant; that he won't find out; that she won't leave him; that they won't get caught. Danny may be gambling with money. Everyone else, from school-children to the Catholic priest, is gambling with their lives and their own and other people's happiness.
If gambling is the fuse, sex is the fuel that propels the narrative from farce to tragedy. Forget eroticism. This is sex in the raw - stripped of clothes certainly, but also stripped of any pretence of romance or love, or indeed affection. It makes for unsettling viewing. On the strength of the first episode, McGovern's world is a bleak place. Only his humour makes it bearable. On life in Liverpool: "Beats living in Bosnia." On God: "What kind of a sick twisted bastard could think of piles?" On marriage: "Sex once a week, but only when he's finished the racing page." And those still hankering after the actor's life should spare a thought for Charles Dale, who plays the chef whose hobby is other people's wives. For the sex scenes, first his legs were waxed, then a layer of pink lycra was stuck to his private parts with double-sided toupee tape. Then the cameras rolled.
Rather him than me.