TeeJay's musings on her favourite TV shows, actors and fandom in general.
It was in early September that something popped up on the socials announcing John Simm was going to appear as one of the panel guests for Dave Haslam’s new book launch Creative Journeys as part of the Manchester Literature Festival. And I thought: Manchester. Hm. That’s not that far. Let’s look into flights and accommodation.
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Have you ever wanted to see John Simm play someone you absolutely do not like and absolutely do not want to like – who you want to abhor and who makes you physically cringe? Then Crime may be just the thing for you. Because this one is very different from the kind of roles we typically see him in!
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Imagine the last time you saw your father almost 20 years ago, he violently beat you for reasons he always refused to disclose, and now your sister calls you and says you need to come home to help take care of him—or rather the version of him that remains beyond his Alzheimer’s addled brain. That’s the situation that washed up journalist Tom Ronstadt finds himself in, and it’s a real predicament.
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What if you meet a total stranger and then discover that you have more in common than you ever thought possible?
That’s the ultimate journey of the ITV series Strangers from 2018 that was just recently aired on German free TV for the first time, which prompted me to watch it again. And it made me realise again just how bloody good it is!
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If you’ve watched some of the more recent John Simm interviews where he talks about his recurring role of Roy Grace on ITV’s popular crime series Grace, you might have heard him say that while he’s very grateful for the opportunity to embody the whip-smart detective, he also sometimes wants to break out of the goody-two-shoes mould and play something very different.
One such chance came along when he was offered a role on the 2025 UKTV series I, Jack Wright. And when you dive in and meet washed-out music producer Gray Wright, the appeal of the role quickly becomes apparent. Because, really, the man is a bit of a mess.
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It doesn’t happen very often, but occasionally I get drawn into a TV series deeply enough that I start losing sleep over it – in the sense that I know I need to switch off the telly and go to bed because it’s past 1 a.m. and I have to work the next day, but I can’t because it’s just that good and I need to know what happens next.
So here I am, that next day, bleary-eyed and worse for wear, writing up my thoughts about it in a manner that is probably a little less coherent than it should be.
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As someone blogging about John Simm’s work, I would be remiss if I didn’t also cover one of his longest-running roles. Who I’m talking about is Roy Grace from the ITV series Grace, based on the popular novels by English crime novelist Peter James.
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