The opening scene of Code of Silence doesn’t look that different to many other crime series – a young woman with blood on her hand, a police car with flashing lights. But pay attention to the sound. Or the lack of it. Because that’s the first clue that this six-part British drama is something far more interesting than your usual police procedural.
That opening scene makes it clear there’s danger down the line, but the show then takes us back to three weeks earlier.
In a widely praised performance, Rose Ayling-Ellis (Ludwig, Doctor Who) stars as Alison Brooks, a Deaf woman working in a police canteen. Her lip-reading skills catch the attention of DS Ashleigh Francis (Ghosts and Call The Midwife star Charlotte Ritchie) and DI James Marsh (Broadchurch’s Andrew Buchan), and she finds herself recruited to assist in a covert surveillance operation on a dangerous gang. Things get complicated, though, when she finds herself drawn to one of the suspects, hacker Liam Barlow (Kieron Moore, Vampire Academy).
It is Ayling-Ellis’ first lead role, but you wouldn’t know it. She shines, gripping your attention from the start. There’s great chemistry on-screen chemistry with Moore, and plenty of other talent in the cast, including Joe Absolom (Silent Witness, Doc Martin) as a gang member, Deaf actress/creator Fifi Garfield as Alison’s mother Julie and Nathan Armarkwei Laryea as DC Ben Lawford (Doctor Who, The Witcher).
Rose Ayling-Ellis as Alison Brooks in Code of Silence. Credit: Mammoth Screen / ITV
The idea for the show came to creator, writer and executive producer Catherine Moulton after her own experiences with hearing loss and taking lip reading lessons.
“It was only then that I fully understood the work that lip readers do. It’s estimated that only 30-40 per cent of speech sounds can be lip read even in ideal situations. The rest comes from context. Lip reading is complicated guesswork, piecing together of clues in real time. The visible shapes on the lips, the rhythm of speech, body language, what you know about the person speaking and the situation. I realised that lip readers are detectives, unlocking a silent code.
“From there, my story started to take shape. I love crime drama and I wanted to write a twisty, entertaining thriller with an emotional heart. A main character who has to watch closely suggested a surveillance story.
“Alison Brooks is frustrated with her life. She’s running between minimum wage catering jobs, never quite able to make ends meet and constantly having to prove herself. As a Deaf woman, she often struggles in a world that disables her. Alison has ambition to make her mark on the world, but she hasn’t found the right way to channel her talents.”
Kieron Moore as Liam Barlow and Rose Ayling-Ellis as Alison Brooks. Credit: Samuel Dore / Mammoth Screen / ITV
Alison soon finds her skills making a crucial contribution to the police investigation, but with challenges in her personal life (she and her mother are facing eviction) and her growing attraction to Liam, she’s got a lot going on. She’ll find herself making some difficult choices.
Code of Silence would be interesting enough with its unusual storyline, but it’s a viewing experience that that’s fascinating too. At times, we get to hear what Alison hears – it’s not silence – and as she lipreads, words unfold slowly on the screen, reflecting her ‘figuring it out’.
Ayling-Ellis, who has been deaf since birth, says she was excited to be part of a series that offered a more truthful experience of a Deaf person lip-reading, while also being an entertaining drama.
“Initially, everyone would think that I walk into the room and hear complete silence. It's not like that. I wear my hearing aids and sometimes you can feel the vibrations and you can’t filter out sound, and then you have noise in your head too. Even if I turn off my aid, it's not completely silent – it’s very noisy in my head. So, it was about playing around with that. Sometimes the sound department would ask me what I hear, but even when I explain, no one really gets it.
“I decided the best solution was to bring in a stethoscope thing that you plug into my hearing aid so they could listen to the environment through my hearing aid. They were completely mind-blown – it wasn’t what they were expecting – so we recorded the sound of the scene directly from my hearing aid and sent that to the sound department to play around with. That meant we got more of the mechanical noise, the air con, the footsteps, the muttering, the banging, at the same time as somebody talking. It’s why we like quiet rooms!”
The storyline and soundscape aren’t the only unusual things about the drama: it was groundbreaking behind the scenes, too.
“We had a clear objective, from the very beginning, to hire as many Deaf, disabled, neurodiverse cast and crew as possible,” explains executive producer Bryony Arnold, herself a wheelchair user. “Our ethos was to be an inclusive set, somewhere people feel welcomed and included and where their voices are heard.”
Charlotte Ritchie as DS Ashleigh Francis. Credit: Samuel Dore / Mammoth Screen
Co-star Charlotte Ritchie says she learned from that diversity.
“It’s so great to have a variety of outlooks and experiences onset and in life. There were things that were subtly different: I began to notice that hearing people rely a lot on not necessarily looking at each other when they speak, but everyone was learning on set. It meant that people looked at each other more, considered each other more and took a second to make sure someone had understood what they were saying. You just thought a little bit more about the person next to you and how they might be experiencing the day and became more conscious of the way that you're behaving in relation to other people. It binds everyone together.”
There’s plenty threatening to tear them all apart on screen, though: Code of Silence is a clever, twisty drama that will keep you guessing, as Alison finds herself having to lie to the police, gang members double-cross each other and secrets emerge.
This article includes edited extracts of material supplied by ITV / Mammoth Screen.
Code of Silence will be available on SBS On Demand as a box set from 10 September. Episodes will also air weekly on SBS, 9.30pm Wednesdays from 10 September. An Auslan-presented version of Code of Silence will be available at SBS On Demand later this month. Find more to explore in the Auslan Collection.
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You can also see Rose Ayling-Ellis in Signs for Change, a documentary that takes viewer inside her world to explore her experiences, attitudes towards the deaf community, the importance of signing and more. Signs For Change airs 5.30pm Saturday 20 September on SBS VICELAND and will also be streaming at SBS On Demand from the evening of 20 September.
