Doc’s a Man on the hunt

Manhunt is a pretty naff title. Makes you think of some bizarre game show, not a solid, serious, sober police procedural about the pursuit of a serial killer.

It’s also unfair, because Manhunt (TVNZ OnDemand, from tomorrow) is actually anything but sensationalist. How could it be, with Detective Chief Inspector Colin Sutton at the helm?

Martin Clunes plays Sutton – who must lead the pursuit of the killer of two young women in London in the early 2000s – as a slightly more human sibling of his bestknown character, Doc Martin.

The humourless expression and monotone delivery remain the same, even though the setting has shifted from coastal Cornwall to grimy London. Fortunately, Clunes has added heart and feelings to compensate. The real-life Sutton, now retired, approved of his portrayal.

This is Sutton’s story. Sutton has said he wanted Manhunt to be about the investigation, not the killer, and it is. We don’t even see the suspect until the closing credits of part one.

We meet Sutton as he receives the news that he has the first really big case of his career, solving the murder of a young French woman, Amelie Delagrange, in a London park. And Sutton navigates his investigation team of 60 officers through the evidence.

This is a true procedural, but it doesn’t plod and it isn’t boring. Instead, we see how CCTV footage is spliced together to capture pictures of the killer’s van, how mobile phone polling leads them to the victim’s belongings, dumped by the killer.

We also get hints that the killer may have struck twice before, and be responsible for one of Britain’s more famous murder cases, the 2002 death of teenager Milly Dowler.

The Dowler case was headline news for months and it’s a pointer as to why, so many years later, they’ve made a surprisingly compelling three-part drama about a relatively unknown police officer whose heyday was more than a decade ago.

What do you remember about TVNZ’s bizarre live state-of-the-nation show What Next? Was it Nigel Latta and John Campbell bounding energetically around the studio talking about eating insects and replacing ourselves with robots? Was it the amount of absolute rubbish spouted by their panel of futurists? For me, it was of course, Derek Handley’s choice of wardrobe.

Last year, we knew Handley for his decision to wear the same Buddhist monk’s outfit on national television two nights in a row. This year, of course, we know him for the government offering him a pile of cash to become its Chief Technology Officer, then withdrawing the offer and paying him to go away.

Handley doesn’t appear to have taken this Martin Clunes plays DCI Colin Sutton in TVNZ’s Manhunt.

at all badly, because here he is, popping up to lead the first part of TVNZ’s bite-size follow up series, called What Next: A New Chapter (TVNZ OnDemand, from Tuesday).

Because Handley isn’t parked in a Wellington civil service office, we meet him instead in New York. It’s a major disappointment to see him choosing to wear a regular blue T-shirt for a very dramatic slow-motion sequence, of about the same length as the Ice Age, in which he hails a New York cab and gets inside. No mention is made of Clare Curran.

Fortunately, the series hasn’t departed from its self-appointed focus on intangible waffle, and this episode is here to tell us that failure is an important component of success.

No motivational speakers appeared to be available to tell us this, so Handley must turn to an icecream maker, a game developer, an entrepreneur and a comedian, who all reckon it was quite hard work getting to where they are.

Handley talks about how you learn from failure and fear and get better. This all makes complete sense, although is hardly new or revolutionary thinking.

Then Handley leaps to his conclusion: ‘‘We can be at the cutting edge with plan B ideas... New Zealand could be a model nation for the future.’’

No science, no statistics, no sense of what these Plan B ideas are, beyond some new icecream flavours, new jokes and new apps.

It’s like reading a child’s Year 9 essay on what the world will be like when they grow up.

Big yellow taxi: Derek Handley.