Doctor Who stars Kingston, Clarke turn detective

(Image credit: AFF/EMPICS Entertainment)

New crime drama Chasing Shadows will see former Doctor Who actors Alex Kingston and Noel Clarke swap time-travelling in the TARDIS for detection.

The four-part series, which will air on ITV, follows a crack missing persons field unit, which tries to hunt down serial killers who target vulnerable people.

Noel, who played Doctor Who companion Rose Tyler's boyfriend Mickey Smith, takes on the role of DI Prior, while Alex - best known as Doctor Who's River Song - plays Ruth Hattersley, an empathetic analyst from the Missing Persons Bureau.

Ruth's main task is to rein in the brilliant but also socially inept and rather eccentric DS Sean Stone, played by Inside No 9's Reece Shearsmith.

Sean is swiftly becoming a liability to the team due to his obsession with unravelling codes and patterns in his investigations, but Ruth manages to provide him with some stability, and he eventually comes to grudgingly realise that they work well together.

Caren Clark

Caren has been a journalist specializing in TV for almost two decades and is a Senior Features Writer for TV Times, TV & Satellite Week and What’s On TV magazines and she also writes for What to Watch.

Over the years, she has spent many a day in a muddy field or an on-set catering bus chatting to numerous stars on location including the likes of Olivia Colman, David Tennant, Suranne Jones, Jamie Dornan, Dame Judi Dench and Sir Derek Jacobi as well as Hollywood actors such as Glenn Close and Kiefer Sutherland.

Caren will happily sit down and watch any kind of telly (well, maybe not sci-fi!), but she particularly loves period dramas like Call the Midwife, Downton Abbey and The Crown and she’s also a big fan of juicy crime thrillers from Line of Duty to Poirot.

In her spare time, Caren enjoys going to the cinema and theatre or curling up with a good book.