DCI Banks

Could Stephen Tompkinson look any more lugubrious?  We fell asleep.  Woke up to a scene in a morgue: Banks, a charred body and a man brought in to identify it.  Yes, he says, it's his daughter, but he then notices a wound in her head, explains he's a GP and launches into a forensic pathologist's explanation of how she died.  Unsurprisingly, it involved heat.  Rather more surprisingly, she still had a fairly decent head of hair.  We fell asleep again....

Next up...

'DCI Banks', 'Spooks', 'Downton'.  Our televisual cups, while in no danger of running over, are at least half full.

Meanwhile, 'New Tricks' has been re-commissioned for two further seasons, so it seems Auntie likes it after all.  Everyone's Auntie....

The Body Farm

And the prize for the daftest programme currently on British television goes to...!

The premise: four scientists led by Eve Lockhart (Tara Fitzgerald) from ‘Waking the Dead’ are such über-geeks that they share a remote farmhouse–cum-high-security-lab where they, umm, do their stuff.  Judging from the first episode, that stuff seems to be responding to calls from DI Hale (Keith Allen) involving particularly gruesome organic matter.

The plot: a bathroom in a derelict tower block has been turned into a charnel house, with the floor, walls and ceiling covered with exploded flesh and feeding flies.  What happened?  Enter the above Fantastic Four to find out.  They’re not cops, you understand, they’re just the cheaper alternative to sending samples to Germany, now that swingeing cuts have closed the official UK labs.

The characters: sensible, moral, sultry-voiced lead who narrates an introduction about making a promise to the murderers to find them, and the victims to find out what happened; sensible, moral man who cooks and is in love with above; rash young crusader; mentally disordered agoraphobic with a thing for flies; grumpy cop.

The verdict: this first episode revolved around three teenagers in a sex triangle, a deaf man who used to work for the MoD and... not much else.  In tone it appears to be striving for something dark and offbeat, but the bookending narration – the closing voice-over was a preachy line about revenge not equalling justice and justice not always being what you expect – made it feel like ‘Lark Rise to Candleford’ with a large dose of ‘Midsomer Murders’.  Only the seediness was all its own.

Appropriate Adult - conclusion

The second and concluding part of ‘Appropriate Adult’ was (once again) unable to maintain the standard of the opener and in this case it seems to highlight the difficulty of dramatizing factual events and the inevitable blurring of boundaries.  Here would seem to be one retelling that needs to be accurate, not only out of respect to those whose lives have been blighted, but also because invention could add nothing to an already ghoulish chain of events.  Yet we hear that some details were wrong and suspect there are other errors.  Janet Leach’s children were not living with her through the investigation and trial, according to her eldest son, and would she have been allowed so much unsupervised access to Fred West?

What these misgivings give rise to is a general feeling of discomfort.  It was far more obviously Leach’s subjective view of events this time around, and weaker as a result.  She is shown as a naive and needy woman, it’s true, but one who commits perjury by denying that she has sold her story.  That same story is the one adapted here for television, so from the viewers’ perspective she is, by default, a classic unreliable narrator.

We wouldn’t dismiss the idea of creating a drama to explore the criminal, immoral and unacceptable acts of which we are capable, nor would we expect it to provide answers, but if its purpose is to promote questioning and widen understanding around this behaviour and our reactions to it, then this ultimately didn’t achieve its aims.  The impact on the victims’ families and friends, and on the Wests’ own relatives, went unexplored, and we discovered nothing of the background or motivations of either Fred or Rose.  To learn that anyone, i.e. someone who isn’t a sexually deviant serial killer, can form a toxic attachment to someone who is everything they morally reject, is no surprise. 

Inspector George Gently

AKA Gently Round the Bend.  Never was viewer in search of guilty pleasure so confused.  Martin Shaw?  Check.  Lee Ingleby?  Check.  Geordie accents?  Check.  Beehives, mini-skirts and kohl-rimmed eyes?  Check check check!  Just as we thought it was safe, up pops craggy-faced Sean Gilder to the unmistakeable strains of quavery-voiced angst used similarly in 'The Shadow Line'.  Then, as if one puzzle isn't enough, there's a 60s anthem, followed by another, and then another at regular intervals, providing aural backdrop to the neat 60s cars.  Ah, so this is 'Heartbeat'!  Or...

By the end of the 90-minute episode, we'd worked it out: 'Gently' has turned into a prime example of television's plat du jour.  Here's our version of the recipe:

• Cops!  Between two and four, usually two; one older, one younger (other examples:- Lewis; Scott & Bailey)
• Kitsch historical setting.  N.B. anachronisms no object.  'Gently' served up a Geordie housewife at an evening yoga class in 1966.  Hmm.  (Heartbeat, The Royal, Born and Bred, The Hour, Downton Abbey etc. etc.)
• Kitsch geographical setting.  (Heartbeat, Ballykissangel, Doc Martin...)
• 'Quavering-voiced angst' soundtrack (The Shadow Line, Wallander)
• Cliche!  A plot involving deviant sexuality of some kind (too many examples to mention)
• TWNHs!  They knew the facial cuts were fresh despite the face having been eaten away?  The teenager was such a natural in the TV audience that she was made host of the show?  The friend named the wrong colour of dress worn by the above teenager, thereby proving she hadn't turned up "til much later"... but when she had turned up, presumably she'd have been wearing something??

Stir thoroughly for up to 90 minutes, but don't worry too much if the mixture doesn't achieve a decent consistency.  For extra flavour add seasoned actors, et voila!  A dish that can be served up time and again.

The Field of Blood *spoilers*

Monday's conclusion, unsurprisingly, didn't quite live up to last week's opener.  Like comic book heroines before her, Paddy only had one hour to save the world... well, solve the crime.  She did so admirably, but we're not sure the end justified the means.  Most of the hour was spent with her running around annoying her seniors (cliche #1), being told she was unattractive (TWNH), being told she was beautiful by colleague who wanted to sleep with her (cliche #2), putting herself in dangerous situations without telling anyone (cliche #3) and having her out-of-line a*se saved by colleague who was terminally ill (cliche #4).

With all of the above happening, it wasn't easy to work out what had happened and why.  Paddy's young cousin Calum had apparently killed little Brian because he was forced to by a disturbed lad (Danny?) who had previously killed his own half-brother... I think.  The scene in the prison, where Calum tells Paddy and his father what happened, hits all the right notes but nonetheless leaves us wondering if a child would commit such an abhorrent act - there is no suggestion that he was willing to comply - on the threatening say-so of a teenager, and then fail to crumple under pressure from his family, police, social workers etc. to tell all.  Paddy accuses the 'real' killer of trying to make Calum just like him, which seems a slim motive, unless we're once again at tellyland's catch-all motive of 'they did it because they're mad'.

And whoever killed Paddy's colleague Heather Allen (Danny or his devoted grocer dad Naismith), couldn't have thought she was Paddy, despite her using Heather's name, because they'd both met Paddy and she looked nothing like her.  It may have been dark and she may not have had her splendid 80s bouffant blonde hair on show, but... wouldn't you check you had the right victim before you bagged and bludgeoned them?  We kept being told that Heather was gorgeous and slim, while the shorter Paddy was the 'fat tart', so seemingly men don't look at the mantelpiece when they're smothering the fire, either....


As far as Paddy is concerned, a little less would be a lot more.  The story focused on her to the detriment of the central, horrific act of child murder.  We haven't read the book, so we can't say if this takes its lead from the original, but issues like marriage versus career and the demands of Catholicism on its followers are touched on but not fully explored, so why not background them and get on with the story?  We also take back the wish for more of the supporting cast.  David Morrissey got to give Paddy her dream job (cliche #5) and Peter Capaldi recited poetry in a drunken drawl that was barely understandable and very maudlin.


Would we watch more?  In an optimistic mood, maybe.

Appropriate Adult

On hearing that Dominic West was to play serial killer Fred West in an ITV drama, our first reaction was to ask why.  In terms of honing your craft etc. as an actor, serial killers must be good roles to get, with no dearth of talent lining up to play the likes of Crippen and Shipman.  However, with this subject matter there’s obviously a fine line between an informing and provocative drama and one that skews the truth and encourages mere morbid curiosity.  As with all matters of taste and decency, it’s hard to judge where that line should be drawn.  The names of Fred and Rose(mary) West conjure in most of us an almost primeval fear, as much, we would suggest, to do with lurid tabloid headlines and the consistent use of the same, instantly recognisable images, as with their crimes.

With regard to the crimes themselves, the details have been mostly withheld, through respect for the victims’ families and a fear of copycat behaviour that goes at least as far back as ‘On Iniquity’, published in 1967 in response to the trials of Brady and Hindley.  Very few of us are incapable of imagining horrors as terrible as those that happened at Cromwell Street, and as a result the Wests appear as modern bogeymen.  What is harder to imagine is the response of the victims’ families to a dramatisation of what is probably the worst thing ever to happen to them.  How could anyone else presume to suggest that it is good to remember, rather than to forget, or that a dramatic re-enactment will provide any sort of catharsis?  How could it avoid being deeply upsetting?

According to ITV, an early decision was taken not to portray the crimes, but to centre on the investigation, and in particular the appropriate adult of the title, who provides the everyman response to the discoveries.  This largely voids the voyeur argument and doesn’t detract from the shocking nature of these events.  Some viewers may object to the portrayal of Fred as a man with a roguish charm, every inch (or playing?) the yokel as he flirts with and manipulates Janet Leach, evades questions, or describes matter-of-factly how he dismembered his daughter.  Apparently it’s an accurate portrayal.  We're on slightly shakier ground with Ms Leach, who despite her fear and revulsion won't give up the case, and subsequently sold her story to a tabloid for a six-figure sum.

There was also humour in last night’s first half, the sort of gallows humour to be found in crime dramas and also, one suspects, in police stations and prisons all over the country.  “We’re here to search for the remains of your first wife, Fred,” says DC Savage (Sylvestra Le Touzel, compelling as always) as West waxes lyrical on the beautiful Gloucestershire countryside where he has buried her.  Dominic West and Monica Dolan as Fred and Rose are entirely believable, while Emily Watson, rather less mousy and more glamorous than she is playing, nonetheless conveys the bewilderment of someone fresh from training, immersed in a complicated family of her own, and out of her depth with what she must now face.

There will probably never be consensus on fictional depictions of real crimes, with real victims.  We would tend, generally, to prefer documentaries about something so recent and so sensitive.  'Five Daughters', shown early last year, won general acclaim by focusing entirely on the lives of the victims and the subsequent effects on their families, something that doesn't feature at all in 'Appropriate Adult'.  However, what this drama has done is to humanise demons: people who have families, children, homes and jobs, and live superficially innocuous lives are capable of the most extreme, violent, disgusting acts.  Seeing the Wests as something removed, something ‘other’, misplaces a fear which, disturbingly, should be much closer to home.