Stag

If you think the word 'banker' begins with a 'w' and studiously avoid anywhere at the weekend likely to be filled with boozed-up men, this is for you.  A bunch of deeply unlikeable characters go on what else but a stag-hunting weekend in the Highlands.  The weather is terrible, but turns out to be the least of their troubles when weird things start to happen.

Ian (Jim Howick) is the brother of the bride and odd man out, bullied by the supposed alpha males he may soon see a lot more of.  The others' treatment of the mild-mannered man is enough to alienate us, and while reviews have stressed growing sympathy with the staggers, the first episode didn't raise more than a grimace when a man's dismembered legs were found in a clearing.  Subtle this isn't, in terms of humour or grotesquerie.  There's a link in the imagination between black comedy and sophistication and Reece Shearsmith, here an early casualty, is a master of those with the 'Inside No.9' series written with Steve Pemberton.  This doesn't quite hit that high, and in fact often resembles a lame episode of 'Lost' with few redeeming characters.  By the end of the hour we couldn't help wishing that whoever is after them would just hurry up and finish them all off for the sake of everyone who knew them.

Chasing Shadows

Room for another ITV crime drama?  There have been allusions to 'The Bridge' because of the main cop's presence on the autism spectrum.  It's clearly the 'tick du jour', and who better to play it than Reece Shearsmith, fresh from his wife-killing psycho in another ITV crime drama.  "Does she have bad breath?" he bluntly asks the anxious parents of a missing girl.  They clearly see DS Sean Stone, demoted to the missing persons unit, as a Holmesian character whose quirks aid his razor-sharp mind etc.  Alex Kingston is his warm-hearted, divorced mother foil, Ruth Hattersley and Noel Clarke his uppity young boss DCI Prior.

His first case is investigating girls who have gone missing after visiting a website for suicidal people - no, not the Samaritans.  And that's about it for feasible plot so far.  The rest is fill: Hattersley has a weird son and Stone a helpful cleaner; or unlikely jokes at the expense of Stone's autistic tendencies and the usual cop TWNHs.  You might be forgiven for thinking policemen aren't the most articulate on the planet, but it's hard to believe that Stone negotiated his way to Sergeant with his lack of tact, or that Hattersley would be daft enough to agree to meet the suspect, whom she's only approached online, alone in what looks like an abandoned shopping centre.

It's ok, but a slightly queasy mix of serious story and odd humour, and will really have to up the ante to sustain four episodes (though so riddled with ad breaks that each can't be more than 45 minutes at most).

The Widower

ITV brings us another dose of prime time true crime, courtesy of Jeff Pope, who penned the West dramatization 'Appropriate Adult'.  Here it's Reece Shearsmith (who must have had a busy few months with this and 'Inside No 9') who sends the shudders south as Malcolm Webster, whose rather bland and gormless manner belies a propensity to spend more than he earns and a rather more alarming one to incapacitate and then murder his wives.  Poor Claire (Sheridan Smith) is the first to fall foul of him in Aberdeenshire in 1994, when he stages a car accident and makes off with the £200k life insurance.

While not having the notoriety of the Wests or similarly outlandish serial killers, Webster must have had some considerable skill at hiding his immoral tendencies, since he wed twice and was attempting to do away with another woman at the time of his arrest.  He didn't target particularly vulnerable women either.  Yet by beginning each woman's story at the point of marriage, when he has already won them over, and then focusing on his short temper, need for control and subsequent abuse of them, his appeal doesn't come across at all.  And where, once he stopped nursing, did he get hold of all that Temazepam?

The Shadow Line reminds me of...

It's time for another post on The Shadow Line.  As the series has progressed a few things have become clear:

- It's too long, and has too many characters.  It would have been better as a shorter, less convoluted story.

- It's hard to follow, and it seems to take pride in this.

- There are still lots of TWNHs - for example a shop is turned into a fireball, and the two men inside walk away.  Hmmm

- It's not as good as Psychoville 2, also showing on BBC 2.

Psychoville 2 is also a story with lots of characters.  There's a mysterious man who goes around killing off the main characters.  There's a woman who has a terminal illness, and her companion (her son in this case) is very upset by this.  There are some mysterious powers at work.  There are some gruesome killings (Oscar Lomax's hanging, for example)  There is a shop that isn't what it seems (Hoyti Toyti, which turns out to have a cellar full of Nazi artifacts).  However Psychoville manages to hold it together much more successfully, and isn't nearly as confusing.

I think maybe someone at the BBC was laughing to themselves when they they scheduled Psychoville 2 straight after The Shadow Line!