Black Work

Jo Gillespie (Sheridan Smith) has an undercover cop, Ryan (Kenny Doughty) for a husband, with whom she has a daughter and a stepson.  His frequent absences from her life have led to her seeking solace with one of his colleagues (Matthew McNulty).  She decides to give her marriage another go, but before she can do anything about it, he is found shot dead in an empty warehouse.  She'd believed he was at a football match (that went on all night...?) and so she begins a quest to find out who her dead husband really was and how he died.  Unsurprisingly, the police aren't too keen, especially as it soon becomes clear that they aren't too sure what he was doing either.

The post-mortem discovery of a loved one's secret life is hardly a new formula, but there's plenty of basis in reality for the scenario, at least, with recent news stories and trials concerning cops undercover for years, going 'native', having relationships and even children.  Difficult to tell whether this will be credible, as so far there have been a few implausibilities or handy coincidences (surveillance teams would go to the trouble of putting bugged conversations on CD, of all things?  Said CDs are stowed in the airing cupboard?  Obliging lover leaks information about dead hubby's undercover identity?  Same dead hubby has a hideout his bosses haven't investigated?).  The next two parts could give us explanations for these things, and the cast is strong enough to keep us watching to find out.  In addition, there's some nice footage of Leeds and West Yorkshire as neither the grim Northern hell nor the American-sell gloss usually depicted.

Frankie

"Call the District Nurse" obviously doesn't have the urgency that "Midwife" conveys.  Older viewers may remember Nerys Hughes cycling around villages in her nurse's uniform and mothering her patients.  This has Eve Myles as a slightly mad modern version.  No bicycle for her: she screams along to banging tunes in her smart car, has a healthy relationship with a live-in boyfriend and dances around her house whenever she gets the opportunity.  At work, she maintains a good relationship with bitchy and cynical colleagues and does her very best for her clients.  This week saw her trying and failing to keep an elderly dementia patient at home with his long-suffering daughter, and supporting a pregnant mother with a sick child and a husband fighting abroad.

Likeable so far, in cast and script, with a good balance of light humour and the serious everyday, and a very good lead performance indeed by Ms Myles.  It's a shame her character, the titular Frankie Maddox, is rather too dedicated to be believable.

Homefront

'Homefront' is a bit like 'Soldier Soldier' with a war on and, therefore, no soldiers to speak of.  The only bombshells dropping on the families left behind are news from the front and the sort of incestuous revelations that come from institutionalised living.  It's a soap, basically, with women getting drunk and getting by while their men are fighting in Afghanistan.

Episode one had a death (and Wootton Bassett-style funeral: not sure we'd have been keen to watch if we lived there or had lost someone close), guilt, recrimination, possible infidelity, possible pregnancy and officer/NCO tensions.  All in 50 minutes.  Nothing very incisive or groundbreaking then, and the church service scene was straight from the dafter moments of soapdom, but it's average rather than terrible.

There will be those who disagree with this portrayal of squaddies and their families, or the fact that this doesn't address the wider picture of what the British Army are doing in 21st Century Afghanistan in the first place, but it's most likely to sit quietly in the schedules for the rest of its run.  Something for the faint-hearted, perhaps.