IN The Bay, teenage twins go missing and family liaison officer Lisa Armstrong (played by Morven Christie) realises her connection to the family might be more than just professional. Actor Daniel Ryan tells Georgia Humphreys about playing Armstrong’s boss, DI Tony Manning, and why the show, filmed around Morecambe Bay and the Furness peninsula, presents a fresh take on crime drama...

WHAT IS THE BAY ABOUT?

For me, it’s a procedural police drama, but within that it’s also about how a community copes with a horrifying missing children case.

The drama also follows the job of a family liaison officer and how that person deals with a family in such a sensitive and urgent circumstance.

In this case we follow DS Lisa Armstrong (Morven Christie), into the house of the desperate parents, and from that position the fingers begin to reach out amongst the community, pointing at who might be responsible for this crime.

YOU PLAY DI TONY MANNING. CAN YOU DESCRIBE HIM FOR US?

Tony Manning is the detective inspector in charge of the investigation into the missing Meredith kids.

He is the highest-ranking police officer in the Morecambe area and this is his case and his patch.

Who is assigned to the job is down to him, and that is very important to how the story plays out.

It’s a small community, so doing this by the book is very important to Tony.

WHAT MAKES THIS STORY IMPORTANT?

The thing about this show is it is a very human story — it’s not a cops and robbers show, it’s about the people, it’s about the characters and it’s about the community.

It’s about caring for those who are around you and it’s about the job sometimes meaning more than what’s happening in your real life.

IN OTHER TV SHOWS, YOU’VE PLAYED A COP. WHAT WAS IT LIKE PLAYING THE MAN IN CHARGE?

I couldn’t work out what it was, why I felt so challenged by this part.

I couldn’t get my head around it at all, I thought: ‘Why are you having such difficulty finding this character?’

And that’s purely what it was — authority. Once I’d landed on that, he became a lot clearer to me, how to play him.

I’m a big guy, you would think I would have a degree of authority — I’m a pussy cat!

YOU SPENT TIME WITH PEOPLE WHO DO MANNING’S JOB IN REAL LIFE. HOW DID THAT RESEARCH HELP?

Sometimes there’s a window closed when you’re trying to find characters, because it’s not what we do in our day-to-day lives.

You don’t want to put too much drama into it, you don’t want to put no drama in it.

And just spending time with people who do it, have done it for years on a day-to-day basis, is sometimes just enough to go, ‘I see where to go with it’.

DO ARMSTRONG AND MANNING HAVE A LOT OF HISTORY?

Manning has championed Lisa throughout her career in the force and there is the sense that they are friends — they’ve certainly worked together for a long time.

He knows her struggles as a single mum and he knows she’s exactly the right person for this job. He doesn’t know there’s a huge secret coming down the line.

There’s definitely shorthand between them. However, one thing I learned from our police advisers is that he is still her boss and they can fall out in the job.

They are close and have got a good relationship but they can still have arguments - and bad ones at that.

WHAT MAKES MORECAMBE AN IDEAL SETTING FOR THIS STORY?

You’ve got this extraordinary beautiful bit of coastline, but within that there’s a sense of faded glory of a once prosperous town.

When you pull back from the pretty seafront and you get into the lanes and the back streets, you realise it’s a town that, like lots of coastal towns around the country, has a kind of seedy underbelly.

There’s that conflict between its beautiful view and a terrible crime, and the two work well together.

Morecambe is not a big place and this is a big deal for this case to happen.

So within that, you learn about Manning and Armstrong, you get to know about their relationship within the process of it all unravelling.

*The Bay starts on ITV on Wednesday, March 20.