Sometimes on a bleak January night the only thing to warm the cockles is a cold corpse. That’s the ongoing selling point of cosy crime juggernaut Silent Witness (BBC One, Monday and Tuesday, 9pm), back for a murderously enthusiastic 28th season. The latest two-parter begins with an auctioneer (Tim Berrington) fatally coshed over the head with a claw hammer – an apparent crime of passion gradually revealed to be connected to a decade-old conspiracy involving an iffy block of flats and corrupt Westminster politicians.
But that’s all background detail. Fans adore Silent Witness not for its convoluted storylines but because it brings a jot of bloody consistency to an unpredictable world. And so it proves with the new run of episodes, which reintroduce Emilia Fox and Northern Irish actor David Caves as flinty forensic pathologists Nikki Alexander and Jack Hodgson.
What a dynamic duo they make as they get back to the sleuthing business. In the two-parter with which the series opened, they solved the apparent arrival of a serial killer to an old person’s home. Now it’s time to draw a connection between dodgy goings-on at a condemned tower block from the past and the gory biffing off of an auctioneer in the present.
Only the victim, Philip Chalmers, wasn’t just someone trying to flog you a des-res close to the train line. He had a previous life as an award-winning environmental architect. The very architect who signed off on a residential tower block that was the scene of a spate of murders (yes, with a hammer!) 10 years previously. With so much going on, Nikki and Jack have their work cut out. Fortunately, the cavalry has arrived in the form of DCI Jane De Freitas (Zoe Telford), a fan favourite last seen on Silent Witness a decade ago.
Silent Witness review: Cosy crime drama delivers plenty of killer blows
Comedian Tony Slattery dies aged 65 after heart attack
‘He was my baby, and he died needlessly’: Former child star Rory Sykes dies in LA fires
Dancing with the Stars review: Waltz by meteorologist Joanna Donnelly in memory of her mother leaves everyone in tears
When the show began in the mid-1990s, it had the cosy crime genre more or less to itself. But the competition is today stiffer than ever – you can’t chuck a figurative claw hammer in anger without it clattering into half a dozen passable whodunits going out on a weeknight (though oddly, Irish TV has never quite got to grips with the milieu).
Silent Witness’s solution has been to give viewers more and more of what they crave. That means darker, denser plots: the latest, Homecoming, has more tangles than a dog in dire need of a trip to the grooming parlour.
Yet amid the mayhem, the double act of Fox and Caves keeps it all ticking along. Best of all, this is a cosy crime drama that isn’t afraid of conjuring the odd chill, or three. The killings are presented as truly horrendous, and wisecracking kept to a minimum. As is the tradition with Silent Witness, the new series goes about its business with minimum fuss – and yet, as ever, a roaring good time is guaranteed.
