Houdini and Doyle

Houdini and Doyle is, like last year's Frankenstein Chronicles, a British-made show for ITV Encore, set in a chocolate box-cum-theme park version of history.

Based (in the very loosest sense) on Harry Houdini's friendship with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, it's an odd-couple crime drama, similar in some respects to The Persuaders, where Tony Curtis and Roger Moore had to cooperate to solve crimes and right wrongs way back in the early 1970s.  In fact, they're probably re-booting it in similar pastiche style right now....

This time it's Michael Weston as Houdini, very rational, but also smart and knowing, and Stephen Mangan as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, reserved, British, very believing of supernatural things, but also with scientific ideas learnt through his medical background.  It's a good idea for a show - Houdini was a famous skeptic, and Doyle famously gullible - and they did know each other - but as a show it's 'bubblegum tosh' at best.

Some critics have compared it to Jonathan Creek - for the similar magic background - but it's just not as good as that was in its heyday, or many other things on the TV at the moment.  It just feels like it's not good enough, and while it has a few quirky touches - a rather anachronistic WPC to help them out for example - it feels too much like it's ticking boxes, capitalising on costume drama, and in particular 'Sherlock', and not enough like a creative and original piece of work.

Marcella

Marcella (with a hard 'ch' rather than a soft 's' sound), is a murder squad detective who has taken a long career break to raise her children, but now finds herself abandoned by her husband and compelled back to work on her old unsolved case of - what else - a serial killer.  Anna Friel has a serious line in angsty, gutsy ladies and she gives it her all here.  Every modern detective needs a quirk, it seems, and Marcella's is that she loses her temper and blacks out.  Not a great trait for a cop, we think, but then the team behind this were responsible for 'The Bridge.  The autism spectrum was used to great effect in the character of Saga, and in today's supposedly touchy-feely police force, that's an equally unlikely asset for a detective. 

It's nasty and not particularly new, but may shape up, and if Ms Friel's particular brand of angsty, gutsy character makes you reach for the remote, there is a more than decent supporting cast to distract you.

Cuffs

That's 'cuffs' as in the hand-locking variety rather than the ends of sleeves or a playful swipe to the side of the head.  A drama about either of the latter might seem to offer less possibilities, but at least they'd have lacked the cliches.  Think 'The Bill' or 'Holby Blue', 'Mersey Beat'... or any of a host of MoR cop shows.  In fact, it's probably easiest to sum up the episode with a sequence of cliches.

1: it's the rookie PC's first day
2: he's the son of the Chief Super (would they really be based at the same station?)
3: he's gay, and gets hit on by an unlikely woman and the male duty solicitor
4. he's paired with a tough, no-nonsense old-timer (Ashley Walters)
5. he makes a couple of serious mistakes but redeems himself by the end of the episode
6. his canteen lunch arrives just as they get a 'shout'
6. his dad has had a fling with a detective sergeant in the station (Amanda Abbington)
7. the aforementioned detective sergeant lives with a dog, to whom she's devoted, and eats microwave dinners
8. the mention of a racist released from prison is immediately followed by said racist attacking a victim
9. a stinger track fails to catch a getaway van but unexpectedly stops a man abducting his daughter
10. the rookie's mentor is proved wrong by the rookie when a vulnerable man hangs himself
11. no-one waits for backup, neatly explained by government cuts

Brighton hasn't featured in a good drama since Peter Mullan developed dementia and lost his criminal empire in 'The Fear', but there was little to enjoy in this beyond shots of the wheel, the piers, the marina, the Lanes and... the A27.  The writer Julie Gearey did superior work in 'Prisoners' Wives' and the main cast, other than newcomer Jacob Ifan as PC Jake Vickers, have all been far better elsewhere.  

Witnesses

C4 have pinched what would have been an ideal BBC4 Saturday night foreign cop drama, presumably buoyed by the popularity of their previous French offering, 'The Returned'.  Being French, there's a bit of a gruesome twist on the procedural, with the victims in this case having been exhumed and posed in show homes as a family group, despite being probable strangers to one another.

Our lead, Sandra (Marie Dompnier), is a seemingly together woman with a rebellious past and a potentially adulterous boyfriend, whose former tutor at cop training college, Paul Maisonneuve (Thierry Lhermitte), is connected to one of the crime scenes by way of his photograph appearing on the bedside table.  He too has some skeletons impatient to escape his closet, in the form of his wife's death and his own subsequent car crash and retreat to seclusion.  There's a nice mood of menace building up, but it was slow and puzzling in places.  Why did Sandra fail to confront her boyfriend about the lipstick in his car, despite being agitated by it?  Why did Paul get into a cable car and, having reached the summit, almost immediately plunge back down again?  And what the hell was a wolf doing in a beach hut?  This could knit together nicely, or all fall apart with an unconvincing denouement.  We're hoping at least for some gripping stuff beyond the sudden outburst of violence at the end of the first episode.  

Amber

Intriguing Irish crime drama about the disappearance of a fourteen-year-old girl and the desperate search by her parents.  Each of the four episodes covers different aspects of the same timeline, from the day she went missing to almost two years later.  It makes good use of the device in slow reveals of Amber's story and its aftermath, with the slow and painful disintegration of the family, and aside from a slightly contrived third episode around a mobile phone (no spoilers) it's gripping and harrowing stuff.

In opting for the life-like route, though, it probably splits its audience.  It's a haunting exploration of how much damage is caused by a lost child, but it lacks a dramatically satisfying end and leaves many loose ends: will Amber's father Ben continue his efforts on the 'dark web' and risk imprisonment?  What part did the prisoner who knew about the mermaid mural play?  Why did Amber get off the train in the middle of nowhere?  How did her lamp end up in the water?  Is the man on the beach with his dog a suspect?  And what about the boy in the chatroom, who was in Nerissa's with Amber's friend who said she didn't know him?  Intriguing, but frustrating.

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?