Leading British actor Kevin Whately (Jack Evans) is all-too familiar with divorce in modern Britain. Although he is happily married to the actress Madelaine Newton, plenty of close friends and colleagues have suffered expensive break-ups.
“At my age I have a lot of friends who’ve been through exactly this and it all rings horribly true. My opinion of solicitors is the same as it always has been. I think they’re overpaid and, like a lot of our professional jobs, they’re never liable when it goes wrong. They can walk away from the car crash. Our characters are not the nicest people but I think the law has got a lot to answer for in a number of ways.”
In Who Gets The Dog? Kevin plays a probation officer, Jack, whose marriage to Jenny, a midwife, has hit the rocks, after he admitted an affair with a work colleague.
Kevin says: “Jack is a decent, socially-minded person, and his wife’s the same. They’re both social workers of sorts, she’s in the nursing profession, and he’s a probation officer and their marriage has gone stale."
“They work the wrong shifts. She works night shifts and they hardly see each other. They both know it’s not quite right but neither of them know what they want. He’s started seeing someone else and that’s brought matters to a head.
“They’ve been married for 29 years, and it’s the 29-year itch. They have drifted apart and just stopped talking.”
“Their daughter has gone away to university, so she’s not there for them to relate through, and he’s met someone through work who he likes to talk to. He starts to think there might be an alternative.
“Jenny decides that if he’s not going to stop seeing this woman then she’ll get a divorce. She goes to a solicitor, and that’s where it all starts going wrong.
“The rest of the film is what happens when solicitors get involved, and how they stir up and antagonise couples against each other. It gets nastier and nastier, and it all gets out of hand very fast. The daughter reacts very badly, and won’t talk to him either, so he’s sort of thrown in to a vortex.”
In the complex and painful wrangle over who gets what in the break-up, there’s the question of what happens to the family dog.
“It’s complicated by Bounder the dog, who has always sort of been his dog but although the daughter is away at university, she’s always thought of the dog as hers, and hates the idea of it moving out of the family house.
“There’s a tussle over the dog and the daughter’s trying to engineer a reunion between her parents, while the solicitors are trying to drive more and more wedges between us.”
Kevin says he was attracted to play the role because the story is funny and poignant even though it is about a bitter divorce battle.
“It’s well written. Guy Hibbert, the writer, has been through it all. So it’s very heartfelt.
“But it is a comedy, not heavy drama. Parts of it are almost like a farce. For instance, when he tries to reclaim the dog, Jack has to try and break into his own house to rescue the dog.
“A lot of the humour comes from the fact that he always has the best intentions to make everything happen as kindly as he can without hurting people too much, but it always backfires on him. Every time, somehow, the solicitors manage to thwart him. "
