Is ITV Coldwater based on a true story?

ITV is gearing up to broadcast a spine-chilling new thriller featuring The Walking Dead's Andrew Lincoln, Indira Varma, Eve Myles and Ewen Bremner.

The six-part drama, Coldwater, set in the fictitious Scottish village of the same name and shot in and around Glasgow, follows Andrew's character John as he grapples with his haunting past.

John relocates his family to the rural paradise of Coldwater in an attempt to distance themselves from London, only to find himself grappling with his suppressed resentment and the monotony of being a middle-aged stay-at-home father, with his concealed anger threatening to overturn his life as he knows it.

Following a crisis of identity in London where John failed to step in during a violent playground altercation, he yearns for a more peaceful future for his family, but instead finds further turmoil in Coldwater.

When he befriends his next-door neighbour Tommy (Ewen), a seemingly charming man and dedicated husband to local vicar Rebecca (Eve), John finds himself embroiled in a series of disconcerting events, ensnared in Tommy's trap, reports Glasgow Live.

As their own relationship deteriorates, John's wife Fiona (Indira) grows increasingly suspicious and doubtful that Tommy is as he appears.

As John's long-suppressed anger reaches a boiling point with catastrophic consequences, he soon finds himself indebted to Tommy, whose own terrifying secrets start to unravel.

The synopsis teases: "This is the story of a normal man, in a normal marriage, who finds himself in a far from normal situation.

"A man who discovers a newfound sense of his own power, right at the moment he falls under the influence of someone incredibly dangerous."

Coldwater writer David Ireland has revealed that though there are autobiographical elements, the series is fictional.

Ahead of it airing on ITV, he told press: "This weak pathetic man is very much me, or at least that's perhaps who I once was. He becomes hopefully more heroic by the end of the series and hopefully I have as well.

"I wrote most of the first episode in 2020 which was obviously a strange year for everyone. I was having trouble sleeping and I would write it really late into the middle of the night.

"And the things that were on my mind that are in the first couple of episodes, like the obsessive running... I was obsessively running and I was reading the Bible obsessively as well, and I was reading lots of true crime books obsessively.

"My wife and I - we live in Glasgow - were talking about moving to the countryside which I think a lot of people were talking about in 2020, so all of those kinds of things were in the mix and I just had this idea, I really like thrillers that are like urban men being put in rural settings where they're out of their depth, stuff like Straw Dogs and Eden Lake and all that.

"So I thought I'd really like to just write a TV series like that, which is a really great thriller, possibly quite violent, about a man who is in a violent situation and is out of his depth."

He went on to call John an "exaggerated" version of himself, after finding himself in similar experiences.

David explained: "John is confronted with violence in the first scene and he runs away. I think maybe twice or three times I've been in that situation and I haven't run away but I remember I did hesitate, I froze.

"I just think it's real, I find it really interesting imagining putting myself in that situation with all my fears and anxieties."

He added: "There is a lot of me in there and that feeling of living in a city and having young kids and feeling a need to protect them.

"It's kind of like the character, he runs away from that violent incident but also he literally runs away to the countryside, but he runs into deeper, darker danger and that's always been something that's fascinated me - if you run away from something, do you put yourself in greater danger?"

Coldwater will air on ITV1, ITVX, STV and STV from Sunday, September 14.