Name of the cop’s game
YOU can’t help wondering, when a TV show’s got a name-type name like BANCROFT (ITV), which came first. Remember George Peppard, in the title role of Banacek, a Boston-based insurance investigator of Polish origin?
Did he have to be Banacek? His Polish origins meant he could correct people on the pronunciation of his name, and gave him a sideline in nonsensical folk-sayings. But like Banacek’s slip-ons and roll-neck sweaters, they were just details.
Why Banacek, anyway, and not Nowak or Kowalksi? Then there were Cagney and Lacey, wellchosen names for New York cops, since so many New York cops were Irish. They could easily have been Kelly and Riley, though. In the odd moment, Sarah Parish’s portrayal of veteran cop DCI Elizabeth Bancroft reminds us of that other Bancroft, Anne, the powerful femme fatale in The Graduate.
She reminds me rather more of Suranne Jones as Doctor Foster. In terms of plots that require clever, successful, strong women to act like lunatics, the two shows have things in common. Tipped for promotion, Bancroft is in the midst of taking down a network of gangsters. A spanner is thrown in the works by DS Katherine Stevens (Faye Marsay), who’s been given cold cases to get through. Top of the pile is an unsolved murder from 1990, snubbed as a botched robbery, but barely fitting the profile.
There are a few folk who know a thing or two about that, not least retired DI Haverstock (Kenneth Cranham) and Bancroft herself, who was first on the scene (or perhaps a bit earlier) as a young WPC. In the spirit of “friends close, enemies closer”, Bancroft hastily got Stevens onto her team in the first episode, a set-up complicated by Stevens having just ended an affair with one of the detectives on the team, and just starting one with Bancroft’s son.
It’s delectably tangled and it might be a good week’s viewing. There were some neat touches, such as Adrian Edmondson’s turn as the dotty Superintendent Walker, who reminded Stevens what Stalin had said about getting to the top. “I took the minutes... Never underestimate paperwork.”
It’s less easy to believe, though, that the cops, even Yorkshire cops in 1990, dismissed a brutal crime because the victim was “mining scum”. Even less easy to see why Stevens, ambitious and talented, would have bothered having a fling with DS Andy Bevan (Charles Babalola), who isn’t just married, selfish and rubbish at his job, but a mere DS like her and thus, can’t even get her promoted.
HANDMADE IN MEXICO (BBC4) took us to the town of Metepec, renowned for its pottery and its religiousness. The two come together, most vividly, in the trees of life, traditional statues originally made to teach the indigenous people the story of the Bible.
Tiburcio Soteno Fernandez was one of the town’s leading treemakers, a burly bloke in a T-shirt and jeans, assisted by his two equally burly sons. Watching them assembling wheelbarrows and buckets, mixing clay and water with spades, you could easily have been observing some builders get ready to do a kitchen extension.
They proceeded, in a way recalling the story of the Bible, to turn the brown, wet earth into a work of wonder, alive with birds and flowers, angels and mothers. You didn’t need to share their faith to feel you were watching something holy take shape on the screen.