Love fiendish brain-teasers? Try solving this cryptic crime
Barely a month has passed since BBC2’s ultra-fiendish puzzler Only Connect ended, and already I’m itching for another series — even though I count myself clever if I get one question right per show.
This is the quiz that asks you to spot the common link between four disparate clues. For example, what connects X-rays, fish oil, rivers and a gamekeeper on a grouse moor (answer at the end).
If you’re pining for brain-teasers like that, thank goodness for Unforgotten ( ITV) — a crime drama with all the complexity of a cryptic crossword in 3D.
Four stories that seemed to have not a shred in common swirled around the opening episode. Characters appeared for a few moments, captured in snapshots of their lives, giving us just enough time to form first impressions.
Neil Morrissey was a shifty salesman targeting pensioners on the Norfolk coast with his dodgy investments. James Fleet played an artist living in a campervan on the other side of the country, in Bristol.
What possible connection could there be? Before we could begin to guess, the grimly lugubrious alex Jennings appeared, as a GP suspected of abusing his patients. Finally, we met Kevin McNally, an actor whose face has more pockets and pouches than Bear Grylls’s camouflage trousers: he was a telly host with a cross- dressing drug addict for a son.
What links them is a body — a 16year-old girl, murdered and buried in the central reservation of the M1 two decades ago.
even the most avid Only Connector has no chance of solving this one. That’s the job of Nicola Walker as DCI Cassie Stuart, fast becoming the most melancholic copper since Morse.
We left her last year, having rejected the advances of her puppyish sidekick Sunny (the excellent Sanjeev Bhaskar), and living with her father and teenage son. Now the boy is studying in New york, Dad is always round at his lady friend’s, and Sunny is telling his new lover how much he adores her.
DCI Cassie is so depressed she can hardly summon the energy to lift her wineglass. But she’ll find that killer, and untangle that web of connections. Make sure not to miss a minute of it, or you’ll never understand the solution. Dunkirk: The Forgotten Heroes (C4) was unmissable telly of a very different sort and told the story of the 51st Highland Division at Dunkirk, 20,000 men ordered to stay behind and slow the German advance as France fell.
They had rifles and a handful of bullets each, if they were lucky — the enemy had Panzer tanks and Stuka divebombers. a group of survivors, all in their late 90s, recalled the last-ditch battle at St Valery-en-Caux in June 1940, obeying Churchill’s direct order to ‘fight on whatever happens’. Though they endured five years in PoW camps, they spoke without rancour, and often with mordant humour.
last month, at a cinema screening of the documentary, I was lucky enough to meet and interview two of these heroes: Private Don ‘ Smudger’ Smith, 97, and Private eric Taylor, 98.
One an incorrigible raconteur and the other a taciturn wit, the pair had perfected a double act — Don rattling off blood-curdling stories, eric punctuating the flow with dry jokes. The two of them could make a mint as afterdinner speakers.
This one-off programme paid tribute to the astonishing bravery of the whole division. It was highly informative and entertaining but most of all it was lump-in-the-throat telly.
(The Only Connect answer is ‘the Greek alphabet’: it’s gamma radiation, omega-3 fatty acids, deltas and a beta... sorry, a beater.)