New Blood, BBC One, Thursday, 9pm

New Blood - bold young cops tackling serious corruption
New Blood,New Blood,
New Blood,

Created and written by bestselling author and screenwriter, Anthony Horowitz, New Blood is a bold and surprising seven-part investigative drama for BBC One.

New Blood sets out to show a unique side of modern London through the eyes of two outsiders, Stefan and Rash, junior investigators for the Serious Fraud Office and the police respectively, brought together by two seemingly unrelated cases. In their first BBC primetime roles, Mark Strepan (The Mill) plays Stefan and Ben Tavassoli (No Offence) plays Rash.

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Stefan and Rash are opposites in almost every way. What they do share are the same frustrations with life - underpaid, unappreciated and undermined. Lumbered with huge university loans, they can’t afford to buy a house and have little or no job security. New Blood will see Stefan and Rash come up against the uber-rich and powerful: corporations, individuals, governments and the new breed of criminals who hide behind legitimate facades and are guarded by lawyers.

As their friendship is cemented across the series they come to understand that by quietly pooling resources and combining their different skills they make a formidable crime-solving force. And at the same time they might be able to help each other up the promotional ladder - if they don’t get themselves fired along the way. In episode one, six years after a drug trial in India goes horribly wrong, one of the guinea pigs, Mark Henson, is found dead.

Young PC Arrash ‘Rash’ Sayyad is sure it’s murder and approaches DS Derek Sands. Sands isn’t convinced but DI Heywood is impressed by Rash and offers him a trainee Detective Constable position.

Meanwhile, Stefan Kowolski, a junior investigator for the Serious Fraud Office, is working undercover, gathering intelligence on David Leese, the Chief Pharmacist for six London hospitals. Leese is suspected of accepting bribes from pharmaceutical giant UK Remicon - the target of a major SFO investigation.

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Creator Anthony Horowitz says: “It’s a young, fast-paced adventure series - and I’d like to think that there’s nothing on television quite like it at the moment.

“At heart it’s a bromance, but we’ve managed to film a fantastic amount of action.

“We’re describing the real world of 21st century London but in a way that isn’t as grim and as dark as some programmes we’ve seen recently. I really want it to be entertaining for its audience - young and old.”

New Blood, BBC One, Thursday, 9pm