“Mark Poer wasn’t a challenge for Shardlake. He effectively worked for him. He’d come to him as a boy and he’d helped him out and was kind of a servant, so besides telling him off, there was nothing for Shardlake to do with him. If you’re looking for drama, Mark wasn’t the place to go. He serves a purpose in the book because there are a lot more internal things you can do in a book, but when you want something on screen, you very much need two people to butt up against each other. It felt the correct thing to do from a dramatic point of view.”
Not only was Mark too submissive to Shardlake, but their views were also too similar, Butchard continues:
“Shardlake is very much a reformer, but he wants to reform in the proper way. He’s a very honest man and doesn’t like corruption. Mark was kind of against the augmentations [reallocation of land and wealth confiscated from religious houses dissolved in Henry VIII’s reformation] and there were elements of Mark that didn’t like the corruption, so that stole from Shardlake’s character.
“Bringing Jack Barak in sooner allowed a bit of antagonism between the two, they made more of a couple, more of a duo really, there was friction between them but there was a direction and a friendship there to grow.”
Far from going against the wishes of Shardlake novelist CJ Sansom, who sadly died this week following a long illness, Sansom would likely have welcomed the change. Speaking to The Guardian in 2010, he explained that he “soon realised Mark wasn’t going to be a successful character.”
“He was a bit wet, really; I had to get rid of him. And I enjoyed creating Barak, whom I like enormously. He stands up to Shardlake; they’re very different but they get on despite their quarrels.”
