It's the classic opening device for British TV drama set in Ireland, from The Irish RM through to Ballykissangel - an English central character comes to Ireland to take up a position of authority and finds the natives getting restless. But The Ambassador, the new six-part drama from the BBC, has a new and rather more ambitious twist. Pauline Collins plays Harriet Smith, the newly-appointed British ambassador to Ireland, a single mother who has limited patience for the obfuscation and conservatism of her own underlings. Her chief adversary, and sometime ally, is Kevin Flaherty, the pugnacious young Irish Minister for External Affairs, played by Owen Roe.
It's a first major TV role for Roe, a regular fixture on the stages of the Abbey and Gate theatres in recent years, who also made appearances in Ballykissangel and Making The Cut last year, and here gets the chance to show what an excellent screen actor he is. "Flaherty's relationship with Smith gets off to a very shaky start," he explains. "But he gradually comes to respect her honesty in her dealings with him."
In tomorrow's opening episode, Collins has hardly touched the tarmac of Dublin Airport before she finds herself pitched into an intergovernmental crisis. A trawler has mysteriously sunk in the Irish Sea, killing three fishermen, and a British submarine is suspected of causing the accident, which directly affects the Minister's own constituency.
As portrayed by Roe, Flaherty is more the Brian Cowen than the David Andrews type of politician. "He's young and ambitious," he says. "But he hasn't lost touch with where he comes from. He was at school with one of the men who drowned, and he feels the whole thing very personally." When I suggest that Flaherty is definitely a Fianna Failer, and that his constituency seems to be Wicklow (which would make him the TD for Ballykissangel), he good-humouredly declines to comment.
"It took me a little while to get the tone exactly right, and I didn't want anybody to be making too close an identification with any real politicians." It's impossible not to make such comparisons, though. T.P. McKenna in a cameo appearance as the Taoiseach, for instance, seems to combine the hair of Garret Fitzgerald, the patrician hauteur of Charles Haughey and the Copelanded avoirdupois of John Bruton.
Political correspondents' minds may boggle at the sight of Pauline Collins racing through the corridors of Dail Eireann to intercept the Minister before he makes a vital speech (this is Sunday night prime-time drama, after all), but most of the time The Ambassador neatly tiptoes the line between accessibility and believability.
It's the kind of idea which might have gone horribly wrong - one can imagine the BBC's schedulers nervously keeping an eye on events in Northern Ireland in recent months - but some clever plotting and characterisation allow the story-lines to unfold without too much strain. The North is alluded to, and the personal security of Collins and her family is a recurring theme, but there are no framework documents, three-strand processes or confidence-building measures here. The series does touch on some of the more contentious issues between the two countries, however, says Roe. "I think you'll see some of those coming up later in the series, but the main thing is the plot-lines. It's very story-driven, and the scripts are terrific. I'm really impressed by the episodes I've seen so far."
Filmed in Dublin in the first half of 1997, The Ambassador is a handsomely-mounted production that will surely have Bord Failte beaming in its depiction of the city. The political-diplomatic setting gives ample excuses to show Dublin's Georgian core in gleaming sunshine (in this parallel universe, the British embassy was never forced out of the city centre, and the monstrous carbuncle in Ballsbridge doesn't exist).
As the chief Irish character, Roe also represents this new prosperity, competing in tomorrow night's episode for a new Japanese factory to be located in his constituency rather than the UK. "I think the producers were very conscious of avoiding the older stereotypes. My character certainly represents the newer Ireland, more confident and sure of itself than before." It's certainly a far cry from the last time he portrayed Irish politicians, in the heyday of the late, lamented Scrap Saturday.
While the series may be parsed by critics for its Anglo-Irish resonances, The Ambassador is more obviously situated in the long line of 1990s popular dramas about women in pressurised jobs. The chief confrontations are between Collins and the British public school establishment, as represented by her deputy (William Chubb). Her main ally is the embassy's resident spook (Denis Lawson), who travels around the country "finding out what's really going on". But the series producers are keen to stress the personal aspects of the story over the political. There's a running subplot about Collins's troubled relationship with her son, a student at Trinity, and the violent death of her husband some years previously also hangs over the stories. The series was developed and written before the appointment of Veronica Sutherland to the real post, but the programme-makers point out that only eight out of almost 200 British ambassadors are women.
The BBC is obviously confident about The Ambassador's prospects - a further series is apparently quite likely. For Owen Roe, the opportunity to get his teeth into a significant screen role was a welcome one: "I'd certainly like to do more film and television work, although you never know in this business what will come up next. But the fact that there's so much more going on is very heartening. The BBC has been making a huge amount of stuff here, and RTE deserve credit for doing Making The Cut. Hopefully now there'll be more where that came from."
The Ambassador starts tomorrow night at 9 p.m. on BBC 1.