The real mystery swirling around the first episode of Rebus (RTÉ One, Tuesday) is what it’s doing on Irish television a mere six months after debuting on BBC. In this our present age of technological miracles, there are unconfirmed reports of Irish viewers having widespread access to British channels. Extraordinary, I know – what next? Phones you can carry around in your pocket? The internet in your house. What a time to be a sentient human being.
Unless you’re a higher-up at RTÉ, which, as it reels from various crises, does itself few favours by spending licence-payer money on workaday British thrillers readily viewable by most of the population at the start of the summer. That’s no ding against Rebus, which gives Ian Rankin’s stoic Edinburgh copper a 21st-century do-over while preserving his valiant dourness.
The cliche about crime TV is that the setting is as much character as the heroes and villains. Edinburgh, in all its glory and its scuzziness, certainly leaps off the screen in this Rebus reboot, scripted by Gregory Burke (author of the play Black Watch, about the Scottish military battalion that participated in the British invasion of Iraq). The city comes alive as a place of elegant beauty and misery and paranoia with a runaway gangland problem (remind you of anywhere?).
The new Rebus is nothing like the old Rebus, who was played with a certain dash by John Hannah. The role has been inherited by Richard Rankin (no relation to Ian), who portrays him as a ragamuffin, down on his luck and with moral code rendered grey and grimy by life and its challenges.
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One of those challenges is his brother, Michael (Brian Ferguson), a veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, struggling to adjust to civilian life and to his job delivering groceries. Rebus is also trying to keep a leash on his gangland informant, Brian Cafferty (Stuart Bowman) who rants about the prospect of a United Ireland flooding Scotland with loyalist drug dealers. “Can you imagine that? A million of these fuckers over here with their fucking bands and their politics ... anyone interferes with their drug-dealing then they just threaten to start the Troubles up again.”
Rebus episode one is more character study than a pulsating thriller, and it takes some time for the story to come into focus. Our surly anti-hero nearly derails his career in a shocking opening scene after Cafferty rams a car the detective was driving with friend George. With George paralysed, Rebus tries to strangle Cafferty only for his superior (Caroline Lee Johnson) to walk him back from the edge. Later, he becomes suspicious when his new police partner, Siobhán (Lucie Shorthouse), is revealed to have connections to the force’s internal affairs department.
Elsewhere, he has the standard smoking crater of a personal life. His marriage has fallen apart, his ex (Amy Manson) has got together with a smarmy executive (Nick Rhys), and Rebus is conducting an affair with the wife of his former police mentor, now a broken man (and no wonder). That’s a lot to keep track of though helpfully the whole thing has already aired on the BBC, so Rebus fans will already have had an opportunity to get to grips with the reborn crime-stopper and his trail of emotional carnage.
[ Fair dues to Nicole Kidman, but who’s watching all the telly she’s in?Opens in new window ]
