Seasoned detective who can’t stay retired
He has a limp and a brain tumour. He’s retired, but he’s back on the case. Despite his medical afflictions, Julien Baptiste of Baptiste (Soho, Sundays) can’t turn his former boss down. When he’s asked to help an Englishman look for his niece in Amsterdam, he joins the search. Natalie has turned off her bulb in the red light district and gone missing.
The limp goes in search of a pimp. Baptiste and Edward Stratton stomp around the city’s colourful streets holding Natalie’s photo aloft, but without success. They eventually track down Kim Vogel, who owns a collective for sex workers. Vogel puts them off the scent, but Baptiste isn’t deceived.
He claims Vogel was Dragomir Zelincu, the leader of a brutal Romanian gang. He disappeared several years ago, transitioned and reappeared as the beautifully botoxed Vogel. Why that’s important remains a mystery as Baptiste
explores further.
As the episode ends, Natalie is found and Stratton exposed. Also exposed is a human head in Stratton’s fridge. It’s certainly not part of his mixed salad. The skull belongs to Peter, who collects shells on an English beach, yet is killed and beheaded by a mysterious criminal called Constantin.
There are many unexplained details in Baptiste as he delves into the underworld and uncovers a complex web of deceit and lies. Remember The Missing? This is a spin-off series, with Baptiste returning to solve the crimes of a depraved Europe.
Baptiste is a wonderful character. By now he should be a sickness beneficiary, but he has a seasoned detective’s sense of right and wrong. He knows every variation of the truth and which one to believe.
The series is gripping from the start. It’s meticulously plotted, effectively acted and knows how to end an episode. I’m sure The Missing was free-to-air last time. So what’s Baptiste doing on Soho?
Could it be that brave social experiment called Married At First Sight has more appeal for those who don’t have Sky or Netflix? I doubt it.
Part of me loved Billy Connolly: Made in Scotland (Prime, Sunday), part of me felt it was a hastily contrived series for a legendary comedian while still capable of fronting it.
It had little structure, but then Connolly claimed he was on a pristine wander through Scotland.
‘‘I’m at the wrong end of the telescope of life,’’ he admits as he reveals that knitted woolly swimming trunks weren’t a figment of his imagination. More a fig leaf, Connolly. They were the sort of swimwear Adam wore in the Garden of Eden. One dip and they revealed everything.
Billy asks a collective of knitters to work off a 1940s pattern. The trunks were ‘‘a plot from keeping us sexy’’, he claimed as he instructs foolhardy friends to wear them and swim in a freezing Scottish lake. The view may have resembled the Caribbean, but it wasn’t the Bahamas. Connolly would know.
The two-part series was a leisurely trip punctuated by live footage where he raged on stage. He talked about everyday things and related to his audience. If there was a similarly to Fred Dagg, it was proved when Connolly sang his gumboot song.
Sadly, there was no reference to wife, New Zealand-born psychologist Pamela Stephenson. Lady Connolly may have been his ‘‘rock’’ but, at the time, she was probably back in the United States, presiding over her Sexuality Centre, while he reminisced about his woollen swimming trunks. He’d make a good patient.
Proven Innocent (TV One, Mondays) is not just for night owls, but moreporks with insomnia.
Madeleine Scott has been wrongly convicted for murder, but now she’s out of jail seeking revenge and targeting the man who put her there, Gore Bellows.
Bellows is seeking to be attorneygeneral for the State of Illinois and Scott is out to prove he’s corrupt. Revisiting his cases is a good way to start. Now a trained lawyer, she’s successful with two, but that’s not enough.
It’s a good enough series, but TV programmers must admit guilt for bad placement unless proven innocent.