Professor T season 2 is due to hit our screens soon, with Ben Miller reprising his role as brilliant Cambridge University criminologist Professor Jasper Tempest, who lends his expertise to his former student DS Lisa Donckers (Emma Naomi) and her team.
The first season of the show — a remake of a popular Belgian detective drama — ended with a shocking revelation, as the Professor experienced a flashback to his youth which pictured him holding a shotgun and pointing it at his father, who died shortly afterwards. But does this mean the Professor was responsible for his father's death?
Here's everything you need to know about the new season of Professor T...
- Professor T star Ben Miller: 'I was born to play this part'
- Professor T star Juliet Aubrey: 'I had secret lessons!'
- How to watch Professor T online anywhere in the world
Professor T season 2 release date
Professor T season 2 begins on ITV in the UK on Friday September 16 at 9pm. Episodes will also be available weekly on ITV Hub. Please note release dates currently can change. There's no US release date currently.
Professor T season 2 cast — who's in it?
Ben Miller reprises his role as Professor Jasper Tempest, a skilled Cambridge University criminologist who also moonlights as a consultant for the police. The Professor, who has obsessive compulsive disorder, can be frustrating to work with due to his fastidiousness and his general disdain for people less intelligent than he is, but he has an incredible knack for getting right to the heart of a crime.
Also returning for the second season are Bridgerton's Emma Naomi as DS Lisa Donckers, Barney White as DS Dan Winters, and Juliet Aubrey as DCI Christina Brand, the police chief who also happens to be the Professor's former fiancée.
Frances de la Tour is also back as Adelaide Tempest, the Professor's overbearing mother, and Sarah Woodward as the Professor's forthright personal assistant, Ingrid Snares.
There's also a new cast member joining the show for season two: Juliet Stevenson has signed up to play Dr Helena Goldberg, the psychiatrist who the Professor enlists to help him get to the bottom of his behavioural tics and his traumatic childhood memories.
Professor T season 2 episode guide
Season two of Professor T consists of six episodes. Here's our guide to what's in store...
Episode 1: Ring Of Fire
When a student is left badly burned and in a coma after a house fire, the CID team overcome their reluctance to call in Professor T as it emerges that the victim was drugged, and the fire started deliberately.
Episode 2: The Mask Murders
A prominent barrister and his second wife are found shot to death in a crime that has uncanny parallels to a double murder that he successfully prosecuted 15 years ago.
More synopses will be added when they're released by the broadcaster.
Is there a trailer for Professor T season 2?
There's no trailer for Professor T season 2 just yet, but we'll keep this page updated with any new trailers and clips.
Interview with Ben Miller (Professor Jasper Tempest)
How excited are you to be playing Professor T again?
"I just absolutely love playing this part, it speaks to me in so many different ways. I find it very moving, the way that there's always some kind of connection between what's going on with Professor T, and the main 'murder of the week' story. It also manages to be really funny — I love the mix of the really moving stuff and the light and funny stuff.
"The biggest kick I get out of it is, as somebody who has had OCD — and to a certain extent I think once you've had OCD, you sort of always have OCD — the Professor is so unashamed and unreserved about his own problems. I find that really liberating, he just doesn't care. It's a joy to play someone who's so uninhibited about his own inhibitions!"
The first season ended with the revelation that he may have been responsible for his father's death. What repercussions will we see from that?
"In the first series, the cat comes out of the bag, and in this second series he's not able to — I'm going to really mix my metaphors! — put the genie back in the bottle. He's got these very intrusive memories of holding a shotgun, pointing it at his father, seeing his father dead, and feeling huge amounts of guilt and shame about this event in his childhood.
"He finds that he just can't keep that bottled up anymore, so in the first episode he finally decides to seek help from a therapist. And him seeking therapy opens the door to other characters wanting him to look at other aspects of his behaviour, for example his mother, so he starts to talk about his relationship with his mother, and to look at all his relationships with women. It's fascinating — and Juliet Stevenson plays the therapist, which is amazing!"
Can you give us a taster of the opening episode?
"There's a fire in a student flat. DS Donckers happens to be one of the first people on the scene as they're rushing students out of this burning building, and she has the presence of mind to take a photograph of the crowd, so she knows not only who was there, but who was watching the blaze.
"It doesn't look like a case of arson to begin with, it just looks like an accidental fire, but then Professor T comes along and says 'we really have to figure out whether this is the work of an arsonist or a pyromaniac', so it's all about profiling the different people involved."
What was it like working with Juliet Stevenson?
"I was very nervous! The Professor becomes desperate to have therapy because of all this stuff crowding in on him, all these weird memories, but he goes along to his first session and finds that he locks up — he's trying to participate, but he can't help himself from seeing her as a sparring partner, and wanting to outsmart her in some way. Juliet's character is just very disarming and finds her way through very, very quickly. They go on a real journey together, and there are some very surprising and moving moments along the way.
"I was expecting that Juliet would be brilliant at doing the dramatic scenes, but I guess what I hadn't expected was that she would be so funny, and so able to do the light, funny scenes as beautifully as she did. I have to say, by the end I never really got over that 'it's Juliet Stevenson!' feeling!"
One of the unique elements of the show is its use of fantasy sequences. What can we expect from those in season 2?
"There's one episode in particular I think is really interesting, where virtually the whole thing is a fantasy. It's a very, very complicated crime, there's an entire family that is found dead, and any combination of things could have happened — it could be suicide, one or more of them could be a murderer — and he solves it all with fantasy. The way that it's been written is you're kind of moving in and out of fantasy all the time, there's a continual fantasising of what could have happened, what didn't happen — it's like this beautifully-orchestrated dance, it's a very clever episode.
"What I love about the fantasies is when they reveal what's going on inside the Professor and how differently he sees the world. He just sees things in a really funny way — at one point he has a council meeting of some sort in the university, and it's incredibly boring, and while somebody is droning on he imagines a brass band behind them playing at full volume!"
