WHAT’S HOT TO WATCH TODAY
YOU really ought to watch THE INTERCEPTOR (9pm, BBC1). But in a way you probably already have.
Not because it’s been on before, but because everything about it – the set-up, characters, dialogue (especially the dialogue) – has a ring of familiarity to it.
Or do I mean cliché? Yes, that’s probably a better word.
O-T Fagbenle plays Ash, a very cross man, haunted by issues from his past, who gets hired by a toplevel crime-busting surveillance unit to help them keep tabs on some high-ranking crims.
Quite why they take him on, God alone knows, because theirs is an operation that uses stealth, subtlety and infinite patience to monitor those they ultimately want to nab. And, on first impressions, Ash is a bloke who’d rather to cut to the chase – The Interceptor does have a LOT of chasing – and give the bad guys (usually the relatively insignificant ones, further down the chain) a good pasting, screwing up months of painstaking surveillance work.
So yeah – a crime-fighter from the wrong side of the tracks, driven by his personal demons, grappling with anger-management issues, at odds with his bosses, blah blah. And yet somehow I quite like it.
There are nice flashes of humour, even if they do feel as if they’ve been shoved into the script at the eleventh hour to stop it being wholly po-faced. And it certainly can’t be accused of plodding, pace-wise.
Oh, and did I mention it’s got ex-EastEnder Jo Joyner as Ash’s frisky missus? Plus Trevor Eve as the seemingly untouchable drugs villain at the top of the tree? Well, I have now.