TV REVIEW:With her baggy M&S cardigans and haphazard approach, you can't believe she rose through the ranks
LAST WEEK the controller of BBC1, Danny Cohen, said he didn't recommission Zen, the Rufus Sewell suits-and-scenery crime series, because he doesn't want too many male detectives on the telly. Then this week two new female detectives turn up (though on UTV). So there must be something in the air – or the research – prompting the hunt for a rightful heir to Helen Mirren's Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect.(Though, come to think of it, the 1980s supersleuths of Cagney & Laceyare the true goddesses of TV police procedurals.) But the next in line to the throne is not Vera(UTV, Sunday). The brilliant Brenda Blethyn plays the detective of the title, and her star wattage is probably the reason this three-parter was commissioned.
Set in the north of England – Antony Gormley's Angel of the Northlooks over one scene – it was grim, grey and chilly, and the handheld camera added to the downbeat grittiness. A teenager had been found murdered in the bath. "He places him in the tub like some poncy installation at the Baltic," says salt o' the earth Vera as she briefs her team.
She’s a loner, dedicated to the job, calls people “pet” and is old-school in many ways – she’s not averse to having a tipple while interviewing suspects. Then there’s another murder, quickly followed by another.
It turns out that a deranged birdwatcher went on a killing spree to protect a friend and fellow twitcher whose marital infidelity was about to be exposed.
Absurd plot and ludicrous body count aside – and crime fans will buy almost anything if a few grains of truth are sprinkled over proceedings – the problem was Blethyn’s Vera.
As an actor she excels at playing slightly damaged, distracted, nervy characters, but here she borrows too much from her library of tics for her creation of this oddball detective. With her baggy MS cardigans and haphazard approach, you can’t believe Vera rose through the ranks and got to the top. Even in the fantasy land of TV police procedurals it is crucial that you do.
DS Charlie Zailer (Olivia Williams) is a very different proposition. Young, intellectual but professionally and personally insecure, Zailer knows her way around a police station and the politics therein and clearly spent time in uniform. She might just turn out to be the worthy inheritor of Helen Mirren’s wardrobe of sharp suits.
Verais three separate whodunnits, but Case Sensitive (UTV, Monday) is a tight two-parter based on the Sophie Hannah novel Point of Rescue(a better title than the meaningless Case Sensitive), involving the death of a mother and her child in the bath – what's with murders in baths this week? – in their upmarket home.
It looks like a murder or suicide but turns out not be. There are twists aplenty, with this week’s first episode offering enough red herrings – shifty husband, smarmy criminologist, mysterious doppelganger – to keep the tension up. The plot picked away at the secrets and lies lurking under the surface of apparently well ordered suburban lives.
In TV police procedurals, detectives come in twos – do they in real life? Answers by e-mail please – and Verahas Sergeant Joe Ashworth (David Leon), her handsome, curiously patient sidekick and a sort of surrogate son, while DS Zailer has DC Simon Waterhouse (Darren Boyd), a slightly strange bloke who may be trying to undermine her at every turn or just doing his job.
Either way in Case Sensitivethe relationship between the two well drawn characters is already sufficiently complex to survive several more episodes.
If it’s a toss-up in the corridors of ITV whether to recommission, let’s hope they’re not blinded by Blethyn’s star power and stick with the more believable sleuth played by Williams.
IT'S AN EASY prediction that next year Jim Broadbent will pick up a clutch of awards for Exile(Sunday, BBC1), in which he played Sam Ronstadt, who had once been a crusading investigative journalist at the local paper but is now in retirement and suffers from Alzheimer's. It was a startlingly good performance, capturing the confusion, emotional instability and self-centredness of the condition and how it affects the family, which in this case includes the daughter and carer, Nancy (Olivia Coleman, in a nuanced performance balancing resentful duty and weary devotion), and the prodigal son, Tom (John Simm).
Tom’s flash London life has fallen apart – “I’m a bitter washed-up hack, just like my dad” – and he has fled home to the sleepy Lancashire town on the pretext of helping his sister to care for their dad. He hasn’t been home in 18 years after a bitter fight with his father, who now has no real recollection who he is. As a family drama exploring relationships, particularly a troubled one between father and son, the burden of expectations, the fear of failure and the impact of illness, it was solidly thought-provoking and superbly written.
Exile(another random title) was billed as a psychological thriller, but that element was far less successful and seemed oddly tacked on to the real drama. It didn't even get going until well into the second part. It was as if the drama's creator, Paul Abbott, was having second thoughts.
When it did fire up it was fairly run-of-the-mill stuff: Tom discovers old payments into his father’s bank account, which turn out to be pay-offs for dropping a story about the now-closed local mental home. More than 30 years previously Ronstadt snr had discovered that an orderly was raping inmates and selling off any resulting babies with the knowledge of the home’s director, who is now the leader of the council (Timothy West). Tom finds out that he was one of those babies.
In the end Tom does what his father never did: he exposes the bigwig through an article in the local paper.
It was hard to care too much. Although West was suitably ogreish we didn’t get to know him well enough to be particularly interested in his fate. And there were too many not entirely credible side stories cluttering up the drama: Tom’s sister gets pregnant, he falls for his onetime best friend’s wife. These were all incidental to the searing central story of a son who needs to find out secrets about his childhood from a father who has forgotten everything.
NEW HOME-GROWN programmes were thin on the ground despite yet another bank holiday, though preschoolers got a treat with Punky(RTÉ1, Tuesday), a bright and very cute Irish animation that begins each episode with the lead character, a mischievous little girl, introducing herself with the words: "I'm Punky. I like dancing and my family and hugs and I have Down syndrome."
Voiced by Aimee Richardson, a Dubliner who has Down syndrome, Punky spends her time playing with her brother Con and her dog Rufus, helping her mum and trying to make her granny Cranky (a hilarious character) a little less cranky.
Regular stuff that, without beating you over the head about diversity and inclusion, covers both aims in a way that’s almost an aside to the real business of catching the imaginations of teeny viewers.
tvreview@irishtimes.com
One to get stuck into
The Apprentice(BBC1, Tuesday) The search for Lord Sugar's apprentice is back for a new run, but this year the winner won't get to work for Alan Sugar (though why would anyone want to?). Instead he or she will get funds to start a business.
