Remember 'The Sixth Sense'? "I see dead people." If the boy had somehow grown up to be Stellan Skarsgard and become a UK detective, this would be his continuing story. DI John River is accompanied by his recently deceased Sergeant 'Stevie' Stevenson (Nicola Walker, also pleasing the crowds in 'Unforgotten' over on ITV). Stevie straightens him out, jollies him up and keeps him going. Sadly for River, he also manages to accrue the ghost of the young man he suspected of Stevie's killing, whom he has chased to his death from a tower block balcony. He wants his name cleared. Then there's the subject of the book River is reading, one Thomas Neill Cream (Eddie Marsan), the Lambeth Poisoner, who hanged for his crimes in 1892 and imparts his macabre philosophy.
Given his array of dead head-friends, it's amazing he manages any work at all, but his boss, DCI Chrissie Read (Lesley Manville) states that his clear-up rate is 80%. That could of-course be down to the fact that the victim drops by to give him a nudge, as in this week's case of a girl whose boyfriend is accused of her murder.
It's sad and it's funny. There's a matter-of-factness about the talking dead for River, while his interactions with the living at work force you to remember that he's in danger of a breakdown. In fact, talking dead aside, the main TWNH is that even solving 80% of cases wouldn't save him from an enforced period of rest when colleagues have witnessed him talking to and even punching people who don't exist. Morgan's writing can be great, so we're hoping for something of substance. There are comparisons to Scandi noir, but this is no 'Wallander' or 'The Killing', and none the worse for that. We were reminded in his recall of his late colleague of the scenes of Craven and his murdered daughter in 'Edge of Darkness'. If it maintains the edge, rather than skipping into vacuous light or tumbling wholesale into darkness, this could be among the best dramas this year.
Honorary mention for Adeel Akhtar as Rivers' new DS, Ira King. He was so good as Wilson Wilson in 'Utopia', we were shocked to see him with two good eyes.
The past is a foreign country: they made things differently then. The 1971 adaptation by Joseph Losey starred three stalwarts of British cinema in Alan Bates, Edward Fox, and Julie Christie as the luminous Marion. The three instantly-recognisable stars and Losey's distinctive style somewhat swamped the novel's close adherence to Leo, the boy at the centre of the story. Ben Batt, Stephen Campbell-Moore and Joanna Vanderham as farmer Ted Burgess, Viscount Hugh Trimmingham and Marion Maudsley are, while not unknown, easier to accept as people whose lives swim in and out of the focus of a twelve-year-old boy.
This is the third in the short series of 20th Century classics adapted by the BBC and to our minds the most successful so far. It hasn't the controversial baggage of 'Lady Chatterley' nor the stage bound setting of 'An Inspector Calls', just a first line that (unlike the current shenanigans with Hamlet's monologue on the London stage) belongs in the opening scene. Nuanced performances from Lesley Manville as Mrs. Maudsley and Campbell-Moore as the facially scarred Trimmingham keep the novel's fine balance of ambiguity and acuity as young Leo (Jack Hollington) is dropped deep into the maelstrom of adult love, class and propriety, never to be the same again.
Much has been made of the scheduling opposite the opener of the final series of 'Downton Abbey', but they are surely not fighting for the same audience. That's cod roe, and this is caviar.
Fleming is the new 3 part dramatisation of Ian Fleming's life up to the writing of Casino Royale. It opens with Fleming and his wife swimming in Jamaica, then returing to Goldeneye, for him to finish the manuscript. In this first five minutes you had the two main problems: first it's showing off its big budget Bond-ness in a pointless (but beautiful) underwater scene, and then the final line, "The bitch is dead now" being typed out, clunk, clunk, clunk....
Ideally this would be like a 'wartime James Bond' - surely someone must have pitched this - but since Fleming wasn't Bond himself (Bond was more a composite of many agents that Fleming had met - Sydney Cotton, Fitzroy Maclean, Dusan Popov and others) instead we get a series that joins the major dramatic dots in Fleming's life, close to accounts like Andrew Lycett's Ian Fleming.
Acting and dialogue is fine within these parameters, and it's not for us to say TWNH, because these things did happen, but we can definitely say TWNH to scenes like Fleming walking into Admiral John Godfrey's office and giving an elevator pitch for two ideas in 30 seconds, one of which was Operation Mincemeat.
Another problem is that Fleming wasn't likeable or even sympathetic, except maybe as an overshadowed younger brother. The final problem is that it's just not very interesting or watchable.
Fleming wasn't Bond, but was a genuine war hero, and there could have been a good, shorter drama if it had focussed on things like Mincemeat, but it's too concerned in showing the details of his personal life, while making visual nods to Bond at every opportunity. We won't say it's shaky and not stirring, we'll stick with it's a shame.
Screened over five days and likened to 'The Killing' (but by whom, we don't know) this had us thinking it was 'Midsomer Murders' at first. Every drama featuring an English village tradition has this curse, thanks to ITV.... The May Queen goes missing on her way to the parade and secrets start popping up like weeds after rain. This takes care to set up suspects from the start: one character chain-smokes and keeps away from his wife; another - a cop - has blood on his clothes and gets tetchy when his wife finds him having a shower and yet a third hides something in a bag in a cupboard and locks it up. As usual, a dog makes a find in the woods, but it's a sort of Well Dressing in the woods rather than a body. And as usual all the men seem to know that the supposedly innocent 14-year-old Hattie Sutton is anything but.
It's a bit odd that the men of the village form a search party and head straight to the woods, rather than following her supposed route by bicycle through the village, and unaccompanied by any police. There are a number of characters, whose relationships aren't yet clear (who's the guy on the screen?) so the next-day screenings are a good idea.
So far this feels like an uneasy mix of 'Midsomer' and Jez Butterworth's play of mythic truths 'Jerusalem'. We hope it coalesces into something more gripping than a standard whodunnit.
