Hunting a killer in your nightie, Vera? It’s not a classy look, pet!
Some women wear their nightclothes everywhere these days. The garage, the supermarket, taking their kids to school — if there’s a lady in onesie pyjamas ahead of you in the check-out queue, don’t make a comment unless you want a mouthful of abuse.
But we expect better from our police. So it was disappointing to see the mother-hen detective Vera (ITV) apparently had a nightie on under her tattered raincoat, as she investigated a murder on a North Sea wildlife sanctuary.
Faded and stained, the nightdress looked like it was made of rayon, and probably came from an eighties High Street department store with matching pillow cases.
When she’s hunting a killer, Vera (Brenda Blethyn) tends to sleep in the office or in her Land Rover, so wearing her nightie on investigations does make sense. But it’s not classy, pet.
The series returned with a story that made the most of the magnificent Northumberland coastline. This was a twist on the classic ‘locked room’ crime mystery: a body was found on a deserted island, with steep cliffs and one jetty, under CCTV surveillance (from a bird’s-nest videocam).
Vera spotted that the female killer had covered her tracks by swapping the CCTV tapes, substituting footage from an earlier night, so that police couldn’t see her dump the body. The clue was the moon: in the video it was a crescent, but on the night of the murder it was almost full.
That clue had been laid in front of us, when Vera and her sergeant (Kenny Doughty) sat eating chips at the harbourside, gazing at a big, luminous, computer-generated image of the moon above the water.
But how are armchair detectives supposed to know whether that’s a genuine pointer or a just a continuity error?
TV dramas are filled with slips and blunders, and our brains simply edit them out.
When Vera arrested the killer’s dad, for instance, he was slumped in a field with a bottle of whisky that was still one-fifth full. In the next shot, only dregs remained, though the drunk hadn’t taken a swig.
And when Vera dragged him to his feet, the three fingers of Scotch had magically reappeared. That wasn’t a clue — it was just a clueless mistake.
Gap- toothed businessman Dave Fishwick was knocking back tumblers of a less potent tipple, as he bottled tap water and sold it to restaurants in Dave’s Guide To Spending Money (C4). A smart idea, if hardly original — that’s how Del Boy and Rodders hoped to become millionaires in only Fools And Horses.
Dave isn’t above trying to put one over on the viewers, either. He tried to convince us he was powering the Burnley Christmas lights with a few solar panels and a machine that converted horse manure into methane.
But his circuit diagram revealed that the festive display was actually plugged into the ordinary electric supply, fed by the National Grid . . . of which Dave’s methane machine was just a minuscule part.
The show had a couple of worthy messages: don’t waste your cash on fancy bottled water, and use a comparison website to ensure you’re not paying more for energy than you should.
But it was all very laboured. Dave’s a goldmine of obvious information. In 1916, he said, only 10 per cent of homes had electricity — but now it’s everywhere. No really, you don’t say?
In his shirts with colourful collars and cuffs, Dave looks like a cut- price Harry Hill. maybe Channel Four got him cheap.